Franck Cappello, an internationally renowned researcher and leader in high-performance computing, has joined Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division as senior computer scientist and project manager of research on resilience at the extreme scale. Franck is co-director of the INRIA-Illinois Joint Laboratory on Petascale Computing and visiting research professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Resilience involves the ability of application workloads to achieve a correct solution in a timely and efficient manner in light of the frequent errors – both recoverable and not – that are expected in extreme-scale computers. Solving the technical challenges of resilience has been recognized as key to successful exploitation of exascale systems for scientific problem-solving, and several workshops have been held addressing the need for practical resilience strategies.

“Franck’s research experience in large-scale computing in general and resilience in particular, combined with his record of successful leadership, make him well qualified to head this new project,” said Marc Snir, director of the Argonne’s MCS Division and Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Cappello received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris XI in 1994 and joined CNRS, the French National Center for Scientific Research. In 2003, he joined INRIA, where he holds the position of permanent senior researcher. In 2009, Cappello also became visiting research professor at the University of Illinois. He has developed and directed several R&D projects, including the MPICH-V project to provide a message-passing interface based on the Argonne-developed MPICH software. He also initiated the G8 ​“Enabling Climate Simulation at Exascal” project. Moreover, as a member of the executive committee of the International Exascale Software Project, he led the roadmap and strategy efforts for projects related to resilience at the extreme scale.

“Franck and I have worked together on the establishment of the INRIA Joint Laboratory, which has enjoyed extraordinary success in producing software for advanced computing,” said Snir. ​“He has a clear vision of the important issues in high-performance computing, and I am confident that as head of the resilience project at Argonne, he will provide the leadership needed to tackle these issues.”

Cappello’s research has focused on fault tolerance for message passing and large-scale platforms and on high-performance hybrid computing. He also has been involved in the design and development of large-scale experimental platforms for grid computing. He has published more than 100 articles in scientific journals and conference proceedings and has given over 40 invited talks at international conferences and workshops. Cappello is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Grid Computing and the International Journal of Cluster Computing.