CRPC's Koelbel Accepts Position With Government's Advanced Computational Research Program

Charles "Chuck" Koelbel, a research scientist with the CRPC for the past 8 years, has accepted a position as program manager of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Advanced Computational Research (ACR) program. The ACR focuses on the research needed to advance the state-of-the-art in high-end computing, and bring advanced computing and simulation capabilities to bear on fundamental problems throughout science and engineering. Current focus areas are programming environments and tools, visualization and graphics, and algorithms and applications for high-end computing across multiple disciplines. Koelbel will oversee the ACR grant programs and the selection of program grant recipients.

"In Chuck Koelbel, Rice is losing and NSF is gaining a researcher and manager of extraordinary talent and energy," said CRPC Director Ken Kennedy. "In his years at Rice, he has established himself as a widely respected leader of the high-performance computing community. We will all miss him, but we know that he will continue to do great things in his new role at the NSF."

Koelbel joined the CRPC and Rice University Computer Science Department in 1990 after receiving his master's and doctoral degrees in computer science from Purdue University. His research interests center on mapping algorithms and programs onto distributed memory multiprocessors. Much of this work is directed at giving users a more high-level, portable programming abstraction than first-generation parallel languages provided.

Koelbel has contributed to and strongly influenced many research programs during his years with the CRPC, including the FORTRAN D compiler project, D System Programming Tools project, and Scalable Input/Output Consortium. He served as executive director of the High Performance Fortran Forum from 1992 to 1993.

More recently, Koelbel worked on the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) as part of a nationwide effort to substantially upgrade the computational capabilities of the defense community for research, development, testing, and evaluation. He is involved in the National Science Foundation's Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI), headed by the National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA) at the University of Illinois and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), headquartered at the University of California, San Diego.

For more information about Koelbel's work with the CRPC, see "Parallel Profile," Winter 1998 Parallel Computing Research.