Biographical sketches of authors

Ramesh C. Agarwal   IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120 (ragarwal@us.ibm.com). Dr. Agarwal received a B.Tech. (Hons.) degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay. While there, he received The President of India Gold Medal. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Rice University and was awarded the Sigma Xi Award for best Ph.D. thesis in electrical engineering. From 1974 to 1977, Dr. Agarwal was at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York. He spent the period 1978–1981 as an Associate Professor at IIT Delhi. In 1982, he returned to IBM. Dr. Agarwal has done research in many areas of engineering, science, and mathematics and has published more than sixty papers in various journals. In 1982, he helped the National Academy of Sciences in studying the acoustic tapes related to the assassination of President Kennedy. He showed that there is no acoustical evidence for the conspiracy theory. In 1994, he analyzed the floating-point divide flaw in the Intel Pentium chip and showed that for spreadsheet calculations using decimal numbers, the probability of divide error increases by several orders of magnitude. His main research focus has been in the area of algorithms and architecture for high-performance computing. His current research activities are in the area of data-mining algorithms and database performance. In 1974, Dr. Agarwal received the Senior Award for best paper from the IEEE ASSP group. He has received several Outstanding Achievement Awards and a Corporate Award from IBM. In 2001, he received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Bombay. Dr. Agarwal is a Fellow of the IEEE and an IBM Fellow.

Robert F. Enenkel   IBM Toronto Laboratory, Centre for Advanced Studies, M.S. C1/B4R, 8200 Warden Avenue, Markham, Ontario, Canada L6G 1C7 (enenkel@ca.ibm.com). Dr. Enenkel is a Research Associate at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS). Prior to joining CAS, he worked at the IBM Toronto Laboratory on the development of a C compiler and its math library, and developed parallel methods for random-number generation for Fortran and High Performance Fortran compilers. Dr. Enenkel received his B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto, with thesis work in the area of numerical methods for the parallel solution of initial value problems for ordinary differential equations. His current research is in numerical computing as it relates to compilers and operating systems, including floating-point arithmetic, mathematical function libraries, and the performance tuning of algorithms. He is also interested in parallel computing and the application of numerical methods to practical problems in various areas of science. Dr. Enenkel has received an IBM Invention Achievement Award and an IBM Author Recognition Award; he is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Fred G. Gustavson   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (gustav@us.ibm.com). Dr. Gustavson manages the Algorithms and Architectures group in the Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He received his B.S. degree in physics, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics, all from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He joined IBM Research in 1963. One of his primary interests has been in developing theory and programming techniques for exploiting the sparseness inherent in large systems of linear equations. Dr. Gustavson has worked in the areas of nonlinear differential equations, linear algebra, symbolic computation, computer-aided design of networks, design and analysis of algorithms, and programming applications. He and his group are currently engaged in activities that are aimed at exploiting the novel features of the IBM family of RISC processors. These include hardware design for divide and square root, new algorithms for POWER2 for the Engineering and Scientific Subroutine Library (ESSL) and for other math kernels, and parallel algorithms for distributed and shared memory processors. Dr. Gustavson has received an IBM Outstanding Contribution Award, an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award, an IBM Outstanding Invention Award, two IBM Corporate Technical Recognition Awards, and a Research Division Technical Group Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Alok Kothari   Current address not available.

Mohammad Zubair   Old Dominion University, Computer Science Department, Hampton Boulevard, Norfolk, Virginia 23529 (zubair@cs.odu.edu). Dr. Zubair has more than thirteen years of research experience in the area of experimental computer science and engineering, both at Old Dominion University and in industry. In his tenure at the University, he has developed several software systems. Two of his research efforts have led to source-code license agreements with major companies. His major industrial assignment was for three years at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he made contributions to IBM ESSL product and in the enabling of parallel benchmarks on IBM SP2. Dr. Zubair's research has been supported by NASA, NSF, ARPA, Los Alamos, AFRL, NRL, JTASC, and the IBM Corporation.