Newswise — Ewing ("Rusty" ) Lusk has been named director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. A Kansas native, Lusk received his B.A. in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame in 1965 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1970. He began his career as an assistant professor of mathematics at Northern Illinois University, later moving to the Computer Science Department where he became a full professor and acting chairman.
He joined Argonne in 1982 and is a leading member of the team responsible for MPICH2, an implementation of the MPI message-passing interface standard and winner of an R&D 100 award in 2005 from R&D magazine.
"Rusty has played a key role in advancing Argonne's reputation in high-end computing and parallel programming tools," said Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director of Computing and Life Sciences and former director of the MCS Division. "I am confident that Rusty will do an excellent job in leading the division and the laboratory as it addresses new challenges in science and engineering applications." "I think that the development of the MPI Standard is probably the most important project I have worked on," said Lusk. "The process of developing a community standard in cooperation with vendors, computer scientists and users was fascinating. We shared a common goal and knew that our success would have a major impact on an entire generation of parallel programmers."
The MPICH open source implementation has been adopted by leading computer vendors including IBM, Microsoft, Cray, HP and Sun.
Dr. Lusk is the coauthor of five books and more than a hundred research articles in mathematics, automated deduction and parallel computing and has chaired numerous professional events.
The Mathematics and Computer Science Division, part of the Computing and Life Sciences directorate at Argonne, consists of approximately 140 staff members. Its mission is to increase scientific productivity in the 21st century by providing intellectual and technical leadership in the computing sciences " computer science, applied computational mathematics and computational science. Areas of focus include applied mathematics, performance and optimization analysis, very large scale computing, scientific visualization, and wide-area distributed computing.
Research in the MCS Division at Argonne National Laboratory is funded principally by the Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy.
The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory conducts basic and applied scientific research across a wide spectrum of disciplines, ranging from high energy physics to climatology and biotechnology. Argonne has worked with numerous federal agencies and other organizations to help advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for the future. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
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