Franck Cappello

Franck Cappello received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris XI in 1994 and joined the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), where he led the Clusters and Grids team with contributions on hybrid parallel programming (MPI+OpenMP) and desktop Grids. In 2003, he moved to INRIA, where he led until 2008 the R&D phase of Grid’5000, a large-scale experimental  platform for parallel and distributed computing.  Still actively used, Grid’5000 has produced more than 2000 scientific publications and served hundreds of researchers and Ph.D. students. In  2009, as a visiting research professor at the University of Illinois, Cappello (with Marc Snir) established the Joint Laboratory on Petascale Computing, now the Joint Laboratory on Extreme Scale Computing.

One of the largest and longest-lasting collaborative centers in supercomputing, it has supported hundreds of researchers and students on topics related to scientific computing, high performance, and artificial intelligence. Cappello has also made seminal contributions to high-performance computing resilience, leading research activities in fault-tolerant protocols, checkpointing, silent data corruption detection, and failure prediction. As a member of the International Exascale Software Project, he led the roadmap and strategy efforts for work related to resilience at the extreme scale, and he subsequently became director of the VeloC checkpointing software project as part of the DOE Exascale Computing Project. Moreover, Cappello has become a leading figure in lossy compression for scientific data, directing the development of the SZ lossy compressor, Z-checker compression error assessment tool, and SDRBench repository of reference scientific datasets, all parts of the DOE ECP project. Cappello is an IEEE Fellow and the recipient of the 2024 Euro-Par Achievement  Award, the 2022 HPDC Achievement Award, two R&D 100 awards (2019 and 2021), the 2018 IEEE TCPP Outstanding Service Award, and the 2021 IEEE Transactions of Computer Award for Editorial Service and Excellence.