Lois Curfman McInnes

Biography

Lois Curfman McInnes is a senior computational scientist and Argonne distinguished fellow in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory. Her research focuses on numerical algorithms and software for the parallel solution of large-scale scientific applications involving nonlinear partial differential equations and related optimization problems in the PETSc/TAO libraries. More broadly, her work focuses on high-performance computational science, with emphasis on scalable numerical libraries and community collaboration toward productive and sustainable software ecosystems.

Lois serves as co-lead PI of the PESO project, a five-year post-ECP software-ecosystem stewardship and advancement project that is part of the Consortium for the Advancement of Scientific Software (CASS).

During 2020-2023, Lois served as Deputy Director of the Software Technology focus area of the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP).

Powering HPC discoveries through scientific software ecosystems and communities (slides from an invited presentation at SC21, Nov 2021)

Scientific software productivity and sustainability: Lois co-led the IDEAS scientific software productivity project (2014-2023), which engaged teams to improve software productivity and sustainability as a key aspect of advancing overall scientific productivity.

Better Scientific Software site: https://bssw.io
Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Fellowship Program: https://bssw.io/fellowship

Research Interests

high-performance scientific software ecosystems
computational science and engineering
scientific software productivity and sustainability
workforce issues in computational science
numerical solution of partial differential equations and related optimization problems
multiphysics algorithms and software

Awards, Honors & Memberships

Member of ACM, IEEE, SIAM
Named a SIAM Fellow, class of 2017
2017: Efficient management of parallelism in object-oriented numerical software libraries, by S. Balay, W.D. Gropp, L.C. McInnes, and B.F. Smith, published 1997, selected for the DOE Office of Science 40^th anniversary collection of 40 major papers that have changed the face of science
Winner of the 2015 SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering (with collaborators).
Recipient of the 2011 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for outstanding contributions in research and development supporting the Department of Energy and its missions
Recipient of a R&D 100 Award in 2009 for PETSc (with collaborators)
DOE Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow, 1993-1996

Select Publications

L.C. McInnes, M. Heroux, D. Bernholdt, A. Dubey, et al., A Cast of Thousands: How the IDEAS productivity project has advanced software productivity and sustainability, IEEE CiSE, 2024
L.C. McInnes, M.A. Heroux, E. Draeger, A. Siegel, S. Coghlan, and K. Antypas, How Community Software Ecosystems Can Unlock the Potential of Exascale Computing, Nature Computational Science 1, 92–94, Feb 2021.
M.A. Heroux, L.C. McInnes, D. Bernholdt, A. Dubey et al., Advancing Scientific Productivity through Better Scientific Software: Developer Productivity and Software Sustainability Report, 2020.
S. Abhyankar, G. Betrie, D. Maldonado, L.C. McInnes, B. Smith and H. Zhang, PETSc DMNetwork: A Library for Scalable Network PDE-Based Multiphysics Simulations, ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, vol. 46, No. 1, April 2020.
U. Ruede, K. Willcox, L. C. McInnes, H. De Sterck, Research and Education in Computational Science and Engineering, SIAM Review, 60(3), pp. 707–754, Aug. 2018.
D. E. Keyes, L. C. McInnes, C. Woodward, et al., Multiphysics Simulations: Challenges and Opportunities, special issue of the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, 27(1), 4--83, Feb 2013.
S. Balay, W. D. Gropp, L. C. McInnes and B. F. Smith, Efficient Management of Parallelism in Object Oriented Numerical Software Libraries. In Modern Software Tools in Scientific Computing, E. Arge, A. M. Bruaset and H. P. Langtangen, editors, Birkhauser Press, pp. 163-202, 1997.