Awards

School of Informatics Career Achievement Award - 2014

About Pete Beckman

Pete Beckman is a recognized global expert in high-end computing systems. During the past 25 years, his research has been focused on software and architectures for large-scale parallel and distributed computing systems.

Beckman received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Indiana University in 1993, and then helped found IU's Extreme Computing Laboratory, which focused on parallel languages, portable run-time systems, and collaboration technology.

In 1997 Beckman joined the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he founded the ACL's Linux cluster team and launched the Extreme Linux series of workshops and activities that helped catalyze the high-performance Linux computing cluster community. In 2000 Beckman founded a Turbolinux-sponsored research laboratory in Santa Fe that developed the world's first dynamic provisioning system for cloud computing and HPC clusters. The following year, he became Vice President of Turbolinux's worldwide engineering efforts, managing development offices in the US, Japan, China, Korea, and Slovenia.

Beckman joined Argonne National Laboratory in 2002, and worked as Director of Engineering, and later as Chief Architect for the TeraGrid. In 2008 he became the Director for the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, and managed the deployment of Intrepid, which at the time debuted as the world's fastest open science supercomputer in production. Beckman also brought together a group of scientists and engineers and co-founded the International Exascale Software Project, which has built an international software roadmap for exascale software and co-design.