I am committed to design and deploy HPC numerical algorithms for solving some of the most challenging problems, while fostering scientific discovery.

Dr Hatem Ltaief is the Princial Research Scientist in the Extreme Computing Research Center at KAUST, where he is also advising several KAUST students in their MS and PhD research. His research interests include parallel numerical algorithms, parallel programming models, mixed-precision computations, performance optimizations for manycore architectures and high performance computing. He has contributed to the integration of numerical algorithms into mainstream vendors’ scientific libraries, such as NVIDIA cuBLAS and Cray LibSci. He has been collaborating with domain scientists, i.e., astronomers, statisticians, computational chemists, bioinformaticians and geophysicists, on leveraging their applications to meet the challenges at exascale.

Education and early career

Hatem received the engineering degree from Polytech Lyon at the University of Claude Bernard Lyon I in 2003, the MSc in applied mathematics in 2004 and the PhD degree in computer science at the University of Houston in 2008. Prior to joining KAUST, he held a research scientist position at the Innovative Computing Laboratory in Knoxville, TN USA.

Community services

Hatem is the current co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software. He is one of the Associate Editors-in-Chief of the Elsevier Parallel Computing Journal. He is the research paper Deputy Chair at ISC’25, the Applications and Algorithms Track Chair at Supercomputing Asia'25, the Application and The Panels Vice Chair at SC'25. He has also been a regular member of other conferences’ program committee including ACM/IEEE SC, ACM PASC, IEEE IPDPS, EuroPar, ACM/IEEE CCGRID, IEEE Cluster, PPoPP, etc.

Why KAUST?

KAUST is home to world-class multi-disciplinary faculty members and scientists. And it operates one of the fastest Supercomputers hosted by an academic institution (i.e., Shaheen). These two ingredients are critical to solving nationwide challenges (i.e., Vision 2030), while globally impacting the research community.

Why High Performance Computing?

HPC rocks! It stands at the confluence of many inter-disciplinary leading-edge numerical simulations and is typically seen as the catalyst for scientific discovery. Working in HPC exposes you to these various exciting applications. You could be working with astronomers to accelerate their real-time simulations in finding exoplanets, or with geophysicists to efficiently render a high resolution subsurface image, or even computational chemists to help designing materials of future aircrafts. Join me!

Current Projects?

I am involved in the design of various software libraries, including: HiCMA, KSVD, KBLAS, MOAO, AL4SAN, STARS-H, ExaGeoStat, TLR-MVM, and GIRIH.

Awards and Distinctions

  • Gordon Bell Climate Finalists at Supercomputing (2024).
  • Gordon Bell Finalists at Supercomputing (2022, 2023, 2024).
  • Best Paper Award at the EuroPar Conference (2020).
  • Gauss Award for best paper at the ISC Conference (2020).
  • Best Paper Award at the PASC Conference (2018).
  • Two Best Paper Awards at the EuroPar Conference (2016).
  • Cray Center of Excellence co-PI (2015).
  • Intel Parallel Computing Center co-PI (2015).
  • NVIDIA CUDA Research Center PI (2012).
  • Best Paper Award at the ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (2011).
  • Master Fellowship Award from the French Government (2003).

External Funding

  • D. Keyes (PI) and H. Ltaief (co-PI) 2017; High Performance Seismic Imaging; Saudi Aramco
  • D. Gratadour (PI) and H. Ltaief (co-PI) 2016; High performance computing for adaptive optics on extremely large telescopes; French Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)
  • D. Keyes (PI) and H. Ltaief (co-PI) 2013; Preconditioned Iterative Solvers for MultiGPU-based Parallel PDE Simulations; Saudi Aramco

Selected Publications

Al-Harthi, N., Alomairy, R., Akbudak, K., Chen, R., Ltaief, H., Bagci, H., & Keyes, D. (2020). Solving Acoustic Boundary Integral Equations Using High Performance Tile Low-Rank LU Factorization. High Performance Computing, 209–229. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50743-5_11
Handle
10754/663755
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-50743-5_11
Altmetrics
Keyes, D. E., Ltaief, H., & Turkiyyah, G. (2020). Hierarchical algorithms on hierarchical architectures. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 378(2166), 20190055. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2019.0055
Handle
10754/661111
DOI
10.1098/rsta.2019.0055
Altmetrics
Abdulah, S., Ltaief, H., Sun, Y., Genton, M. G., & Keyes, D. E. (2018). ExaGeoStat: A High Performance Unified Software for Geostatistics on Manycore Systems. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 29(12), 2771–2784. https://doi.org/10.1109/tpds.2018.2850749
Handle
10754/628384
DOI
10.1109/tpds.2018.2850749
Altmetrics
Abdelfattah, A., Keyes, D., & Ltaief, H. (2016). KBLAS. ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, 42(3), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818311
Handle
10754/621727
DOI
10.1145/2818311
Altmetrics
Agullo, E., Augonnet, C., Dongarra, J., Faverge, M., Langou, J., Ltaief, H., & Tomov, S. (2011). LU factorization for accelerator-based systems. 2011 9th IEEE/ACS International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA). https://doi.org/10.1109/aiccsa.2011.6126599
Handle
10754/575804
DOI
10.1109/aiccsa.2011.6126599
Altmetrics
Haidar, A., Ltaief, H., & Dongarra, J. (2011). Parallel reduction to condensed forms for symmetric eigenvalue problems using aggregated fine-grained and memory-aware kernels. Proceedings of 2011 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis on - SC ’11. https://doi.org/10.1145/2063384.2063394
Handle
10754/575751
DOI
10.1145/2063384.2063394
Altmetrics

Publications

Publication list per year
Publication list on ORCID
Also view Publications in the KAUST Repository.
Principal Investigator
KAUST CEMSE AMCS CS ECRC David Keyes

David Keyes

Professor, Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences
Professors