Dr Hatem Ltaief is the Princial Research Scientist in the Extreme Computing Research Center at KAUST, where is also advising several KAUST students in their MS and PhD research. His research interests include parallel numerical algorithms, parallel programming models, 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 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 vice chair SIAM Activity group on Supercomputing. He is one of the current Subject Area Editors of the Elsevier Parallel Computing Journal. He is the HPC in Asia Pacific Chair at ISC’24, the Algorithms, Methods & Tuning Track chair at ISC'24, the Application and Algorithms Track co-chair at the HPC Asia'24 conference, and the workshop chair at IEEE Cluster’23. 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, 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 Finalists at Supercomputing (2022 & 2023).
• 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