Skip to main content
Feature Story | Mathematics and Computer Science

Pete Beckman to receive Indiana University Career Achievement Award

Pete Beckman has been named recipient of the Career Achievement award, granted by the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing.

In the past two decades, Beckman has earned worldwide recognition as a supercomputing expert. After receiving his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Indiana University in 1993, he helped found the university’s Extreme Computing Laboratory, which focused on parallel languages, portable runtime systems, and collaboration technology. 

Among his many other achievements, Beckman launched the Extreme Linux series of workshops at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which helped catalyze the high-performance Linux computing cluster community; he was founder and director of TurboLabs, which developed the world’s first dynamic provisioning system for cloud computing and high-performance computing clusters; as director of engineering for the TeraGrid, he designed and deployed the world’s most advanced Grid system linking HPC resources; he directed the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, overseeing deployment of the Blue Gene/P, one of the world’s fastest open science supercomputers; and he worked with IBM on the design of the Blue Gene/Q.

Beckman currently is director of the Exascale Technology and Computing Institute at Argonne and co-director of the Northwestern-Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering. He is also lead of the DOE Argo project – a multi-institutional effort to produce an operating/runtime infrastructure for supporting extreme-scale scientific computation.

The Career Achievement Award will be presented to Beckman at the Informatics and Computing banquet in Indianapolis April 3, 2014.