Biosketch

Lennart Johnsson is a Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Chair of Computer Science, Mathematics, and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston and is Professor Emeritus at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Professor Johnsson has served on the Faculties of California Institute of Technology (1979 – 1983), Yale University (1983 – 1990), Harvard University (1990 – 1996), and the Royal Institute of Technology (2000 – 2011).  He has been a visiting professor at Linkoping and Uppsala Universities and an adjunct professor at Rice University (1995 – 2013). He has been a visiting scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, The Academy of Engineering Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden and served as Manager of Systems Engineering, Electrical Systems, ABB Corporate Research, Sweden (1974 – 1980) and Director of Computational Sciences at Thinking Machines Corp. (TMC), (1986 – 1995).

He developed one of the first sparse matrix packages for real-time use and had a leading role at ABB Corporate Research in developing systems for real-time supervisory control and data acquisition making ABB at the time the world leading supplier of such systems.  He led the development of Scientific Software Libraries at TMC and significantly influenced the Connection Machine Run-Time System. His work with students on communication algorithms for computer systems contributed to the collective communication primitives when the MPI standard was established. He developed and introduced the first courses on parallel scientific and engineering computing at Caltech, Yale and Harvard. Prof. Johnsson’s interests in high-performance networks, distributed and collaborative computing and visualization resulted in the establishment of one of the first GigaPoPs in the US together with Baylor College of Medicine and Rice in 1997, participation in the first Globus testbed covering five continents demonstrated at SC97,  the creation of a dedicated distributed storage network on the University of Houston campus (2002) and the Research and Education Network of Houston (RENOH) (2005), a fiber network connecting University of Houston’s main, downtown and Victoria campuses, Rice, Texas Southern University, and the Texas Medical Center with Internet2, NLR and LEARN when it was established. He lead the implementation of the first WiFi campus network at the University of Houston established in 2001. For the last several years Professor Johnsson’s research interest has focused on energy efficient computer system design, operation and programming, including HPC data center energy efficiency and recovery. He developed a highly energy efficiency blade server with support from PRACE (the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) together with AMD and Supermicro demonstrated at SC09.  The server became a standard Supermicro product. He is currently exploring the energy efficiency of DSPs for HPC workloads together with Texas Instruments and students at the Royal Institute of Technology and University of Houston. The work was demonstrated at SC12.

Professor Johnsson serves as Chair of the Board of PDC, the lead academic HPC Center for the Swedish academic community, is a member of the Gulf Coast Consortia, the W.M. Keck Center for Computational Biology, Houston, the Baylor College of Medicine Structural Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics program, the Research Advisory Committee of the Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN) of Texas, and the Stockholm Brain Institute. He has served as Chair of the Computer Science Department of the University of Houston, as Founding Director of the Texas Learning and Computation Center, a founding member of the Globus Alliance and the European Grid Forum, the Director of PDC at the Royal Institute of Technology and on the PRACE Board of Directors, deputy on the PRACE Council, and PRACE projects Management Boards, the Global and Open Grid Forum’s Advisory Committees, the Gelato Federation Steering Committee and been an institutional representative to the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC), the Southern Universities Research Association (SURA) and Internet2 and several other professional boards and committees.  He has served as consultant to the NSF, USRA, Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research.

He is an editor of the journal Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, the International Journal of High-Performance Computing and Applications, the International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking and the journal for Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems, and has served as an editor for the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, the Journal of High-Speed Computing, the Journal of Numerical Linear Algebra with Applications, the Journal of Scientific Programming and the Journal of Interconnection Networks. He has served on more than 60 organizing and program committees for conferences and symposia.