[Mpi-forum] Rusty Lusk

[Jack Dongarra]

It's with a heavy heart I pass along some sad news. My dear friend, Rusty Lusk passed away on May 16. He began his career as an assistant professor of mathematics at Northern Illinois University. He later moved into the Computer Science Department, where he eventually became a full professor and the department's acting chairman. In 1982, Rusty joined Argonne National Laboratory as a computer scientist, and he became a senior computer scientist in 1989. Along with Paul Messina and me, Rusty was instrumental in founding Argonne's Advanced Computing Research Facility, which signaled the beginning of Argonne's commitment to parallel computing research.

Rusty was one of the founders of the MPI Forum. He Chaired MPI-2, started the MPICH project with Bill Gropp, and was a close friend, collaborator, and mentor to many of us.

Rusty has said, "I think that the development of the MPI Standard is probably the most important thing that I have worked on. Developing a community standard in cooperation with vendors, computer scientists, and users was fascinating to participate in. The experience was social and technical and succeeded because of the many people who worked hard to achieve a common goal. It was then possible to work on implementation research for MPI to convince a broad range of people that the standard was efficient to implement and use. We realized that we would be impacting a whole generation of parallel programmers if we succeeded."

Without Rusty's influence, MPI wouldn't be what it is today. I miss my friend.

Jack Dongarra

https://obituaries.neptunesociety.com/obituaries/downers-grove-il/ewing-lusk-10754811 <https://obituaries.neptunesociety.com/obituaries/downers-grove-il/ewing-lusk-10754811>


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Prof. Jack Dongarra; Innovative Computing Laboratory; EECS Department;
1122 Volunteer Blvd; University of Tennessee; Knoxville TN 37996-3450;
+1-865-974-8295; dongarra at icl.utk.edu; http://www.cs.utk.edu/~dongarra/




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