Awards

Thomas Hart Benton Mural Medallion - 2013

Big Red II Dedication Ceremony

Bloomington, Indiana

Presenter: Michael A. McRobbie

About Paul Messina

As the ALCF’s Director of Science, Paul Messina oversees a wide variety of projects that leverage the ALCF’s supercomputers to accelerate scientific and engineering breakthroughs in many fields.

Messina’s distinguished career also includes a stint at the California Institute of Technology, where he served as Director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research, as Assistant Vice President for Scientific Computing, and as Faculty Associate for Scientific Computing. During his time at Caltech, Messina also acted as a co-principal investigator for work at the National Virtual Observatory and as a principal investigator for the CASA gigabit network testbed, a visionary project that was a precursor to Internet2, grid computing, and cloud computing.

Additionally, Messina served as Director of the Concurrent Supercomputing Consortium, where he helped bring together 13 institutions, including government agencies and industry, to pool their resources to gain access to unique computational facilities. This effort resulted in the Intel Touchstone Delta system, which was the world’s most powerful scientific supercomputer for nearly two years.

Messina’s roots at Argonne date back to 1973. Before assuming many of the aforementioned roles, Messina held numerous positions at the laboratory until 1987, including being the founding Director of Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division.