Horst Simon

Deputy Laboratory Director & Chief Research Officer
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , USA

Horst Simon is an internationally recognized expert in the development of parallel computational methods for the solution of scientific problems of scale. His research interests are in the development of sparse matrix algorithms, algorithms for large-scale eigenvalue problems, and domain decomposition algorithms. His recursive spectral bisection algorithm is a breakthrough in parallel algorithms. Honored twice with the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize, most recently in 2009 for the development of innovative techniques that produce new levels of performance on a real application (in collaboration with IBM researchers) and in 1988 in recognition of superior effort in parallel processing research (with others from Cray and Boeing).

Horst Simon is Deputy Laboratory Director and Chief Research Officer (CRO) of Berkeley Labs. The Deputy Director is responsible for the overall integration of the scientific goals and objectives, consistent with the Laboratory’s mission. Simon has been with Berkeley Labs since 1996, having served previously as Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences, and Director of NERSC. His career includes positions at Stony Brook University, Boeing, NASA, and SGI. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley, and a Diploma (M.A.) from TU Berlin, Germany. Simon is a SIAM Fellow and member of SIAM, ACM, and IEEE Computer Society.