Bill Camp

Bill Camp, Director of Computation, Computers, Information and Mathematics at Sandia National Laboratories, has been involved with high performance computing for nearly all of his professional career. Bill received his B.E.E. from Manhattan College in 1966 and joined Sandia in 1970 after completing a Ph.D. in mathematical and computational physics at Cornell University. Bill has been a user of HPC, an applications developer and a systems developer. Nearly all of his work has been at Sandia, where he headed Sandia’s work on massively parallel processing from its inception in 1987 and founded the Massively Parallel Computing Research Laboratory in 1992. Bill was the first leader of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) at Sandia. This latter initiative, begun in 1995, is aimed at moving from terascale to petascale computing in this decade. In the mid nineties Bill spent two years at Cray Research where he headed Applications Technologies and served on the design team for the T3E and follow-on scalable vector computers. Bill’s recent efforts have been in developing scalable computer clusters as virtual supercomputers and in bio-computing initiatives. Most recently, he and Jim Tomkins have designed a modern MPP architecture, Red Storm. Bill is leading the Red Storm development partnership with Cray, Inc. This partnership has successfully deployed Red Storm, achieving its goal of surpassing the performance of the Earth Simulator. Large Red Storm systems, dubbed XT3 by Cray, have been sited at NSF’s Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, The Swiss National Computing Center, the DoD’s Stennis Computing Center, DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as well as four other major sites worldwide building on Sandia and Cray’s success.