Alice Koniges

Biographical Sketch

Soon after she became the first woman ever to earn a PhD in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University, Alice Koniges began her career as a member of NERSC’s Computational Physics Group in 1984 at LLNL. She achieved the first successful parallel code run on the four-processor Cray-2. She began her career researching parallel computing and plasma physics, focusing on the combination of these two fields. Her expertise in the transition from vector to parallel computing culminated in her textbook Industrial Strength Parallel Computing, published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers in January 2000. Alice joined the Berkeley Lab in 2009.

Her current research interests include programming models for multicore architectures, benchmarking and performance optimization of application codes, development of Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) and Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) algorithms for time-dependent PDE's, and application supercomputing in plasma physics, laser physics, and energy research. She regularly gives tutorials and short courses on application supercomputing. She also manages the NERSC Petascale post-doc program as Principal Investigator of the Computational Science and Engineering Petascale Initiative at LBNL.

Previous to joining the Berkeley Lab, she held various positions at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, including management of the Lab's institutional computing. She also led the effort to develop a new 3D multiscale multiphysics code (ALE-AMR) that is used to predict the impacts of target shrapnel and debris on the operation of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) the world's most powerful laser, and model Warm Dense Matter (WDM) experiments at the NDCX facility at LBNL. From 1995 to 1997, Alice led the Parallel Applications Technology Program at LLNL. This was the LLNL portion of the largest (12 million) CRADA (Cooperative Research and Development Agreement) ever undertaken by the Department of Energy. She spent 1998 at the Max-Planck Institute in Garching, Germany (Computer Center and Plasma Physics Institute), where she was a consultant to users at the Institute, assisting in the conversion of applications codes for parallel computers. In addition to her PhD she also holds MSE and MA degrees from Princeton, and a BA from the University of California, San Diego and has published more than 80 refereed technical papers.