At the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL), our mission is simple. We intend to be a world leader in enabling technologies and software for scientific computing. Our vision is to provide leading edge tools to tackle science’s most challenging high performance computing problems and to play a major role in the development of standards for scientific computing in general.

ICL was founded in 1989 by Dr. Jack Dongarra who came to the University of Tennessee from Argonne National Laboratory upon receiving a dual appointment as Distinguished Professor in the Computer Science Department and as Distinguished Scientist at nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), two positions he holds today. What began with Dr. Dongarra and a single graduate assistant has evolved into a fully functional center, with a staff of more than 40 researchers, students, and administrators. Througout the past 18 years, ICL has attracted many post-doctoral researchers and professors from multi-disciplines such as mathematics, chemistry, etc. Many of these scientists came to UT specifically to work with Dr. Dongarra, which began a long list of top research talent to pass through ICL and move on to make exciting contributions at other institutions and organizations. Below we recognize just a few who have helped make ICL the respected center it has become.

• Zhaojun Bai - University of California, Davis
• Richard Barrett - Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Adam Beguelin - formerly of AOL, now retired
• Susan Blackford - Myricom
• Henri Casanova - University of Hawaii, Manoa
• Jaeyoung Choi - Soongsil University, Korea
• Andy Cleary - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Frederic Desprez - ENS-Lyon, France
• Victor Eijkhout - University of Texas, Austin
• Graham Fagg - Microsoft
• Edgar Gabriel - University of Houston
• Robert van de Geijn - University of Texas, Austin
• Julien Langou - University of Colorado at Denver
• Antoine Petitet - ESI Group, France
• Roldan Pozo - NIST
• Erich Strohmaier - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Francoise Tisseur - Manchester University, England
• Bernard Tourancheau - University of Lyon, France
• Sathish Vadhiyar - Indian Institute of Science (IISC), India
• Clint Whaley - University of Texas, San Antonio
• Felix Wolf - Forschungszentrum Julich, Germany

Over the past 18 years, ICL has produced numerous high value tools and applications that now compose the basic fabric of high performance, scientific computing. Some of the technologies that our research has produced include:

Our successes continue along with current ICL efforts such as Fault Tolerant Linear Algebra, Generic Code Optimization (GCO), HPC Challenge benchmark suite (HPCC), KOJAK, Multi-core and Cell effort (PLASMA), NetSolve/GridSolve, Open MPI, PAPI, SALSA, SCALASCA, and vGrADS. Many of our efforts have been recognized nationally and internationally, which includes many awards such as four R&D 100 awards; PVM in 1994, ATLAS and NetSolve in 1999, and PAPI in 2001.