Al Geist is a Corporate Research Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Director of the Frontier project at ORNL’s Leadership Computing Facility.
Frontier is the first exascale computer in the world. For the past 8 years he was Chief Technology Officer on the U.S. Exascale Computing Project.
In his 42 years at ORNL, he has published two books and over 200 papers in areas ranging from heterogeneous distributed computing, numerical linear algebra,
parallel computing, collaboration technologies, solar energy, materials science, biology, and solid-state physics.
For 20 years Al led the 25 member Computer Science Research Group. He is one of the original developers of PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine),
which became a world-wide de facto standard for heterogeneous distributed computing and was actively involved in the design of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard.
His recent research is on Exascale computing and the energy efficiency and resilience needs of the hardware and software.