Jed Brown, an assistant computer scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, has been named a recipient of the Young Achievers in Scalable Computing award.

The award, made by the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing, recognizes up to five individuals who have made outstanding, influential, and potentially long-lasting contributions in the field 
of scalable computing within five years of receiving their Ph.D. degree.

Brown is revolutionizing the design of numerical algorithms and software for planned exascale computers. For example, he leads several teams on innovations to prepare the Argonne-developed Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific computing (PETSc) for exascale machines.  Moreover, he has led the development of innovative strategies that enable researchers to conduct previously infeasible applications—for example, in ice sheet modeling—key to global climate change. 

One of Brown’s recent contributions was the development of an elegant and powerful interface for integrators that supports ordinary differential equations.  He also implemented a large suite of schemes for implicit-explicit methods. This work has transformed PETSc—already used in over 1,700 scientific papers—into a world-class library that now engages even more users at this higher level.  Brown also led the design of the PISM parallel ice sheet model and, with colleagues, developed it into the first practical whole ice sheet model with a unified treatment of vertical shear and membrane stresses.

Brown received his doctor of science degree from ETH, Zurich, in 2011. He was a postdoctoral appointee at Argonne from 2011 to 2012 and was named an Argonne Scholar in 2012. The following year he was promoted to assistant computational mathematician. In 2013, he was named recipient of the SIAM Junior Scientist award.