Daniel A. Reed (computer scientist)


Daniel A. Reed is an American computational scientist, known for his contributions to high-performance computing and science policy. He is vice president of research and economic development at the University of Iowa. He previously served as director of scalable computing and multicore at Microsoft Research. He founded the Renaissance Computing Institute in 2004 and served as its director until December 2007. Reed also was Chancellor’s Eminent Professor and served as senior adviser for strategy and innovation to UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor James Moeser. He served as CIO and Vice Chancellor for Information Technology Services at UNC-Chapel Hill from June 2004 through April 2007.
He was appointed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, by President Bush in 2006 and served on the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee from 2003–2005. As chair of PITAC’s computational science subcommittee, he was lead author of the report “Computational Science: Ensuring America’s Competitiveness.” On PCAST, he co-chairs the Networking and Information Technology subcommittee and recently co-authored a report on the National Coordination Office’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program called “Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in Competitive World.” He is also a member of PCAST’s Personalized Medicine subcommittee.
Reed has been chair of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association since 2005 and a member of the board since 1998. CRA represents the research interests of the university, national laboratory and industrial research laboratory communities in computing across North America.
On April 30, 2018, it was announced that Reed would assume the post of Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Utah on July 1, 2018.

Biography

Reed earned a B.S. from the University of Missouri, Rolla, and an M.S. and Ph.D from Purdue University, all in computer science.
Before coming to North Carolina, Reed spent 19 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he led the National Center for Supercomputing Applications from 2000–2003 and chaired the University of Illinois computer science department, one of the top five departments in the country, from 1996–2001. During his tenure in the CS department and at NCSA, he helped secure $100 million in public and private funds to aid in development of theThomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science and the main office of NCSA.
In 2001, Reed was a part of the effort to launch the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid, the world's largest distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research, and then served as TeraGrid chief architect through 2003.

Research focus

Reed’s research focuses on the design of very high-speed computers, providing new computing capabilities for scholars in science, medicine, engineering and the humanities, tools and techniques for capturing and analyzing the performance of parallel systems, and collaborative virtual environments for real-time performance analysis. He led the Pablo Research Group, which investigates the interaction of architecture, system software, and applications on large-scale parallel and distributed computer systems. The group created SvPablo, a graphical environment for instrumenting application source code and browsing dynamic performance data. Key research foci of the group included exploration of performance analysis techniques and compiler-aided scalability analysis, scalable parallel file systems, and real-time adaptive systems for resource policy control.
Reed is a frequent speaker on these research topics and also speaks on the role of technology in innovation, economic development and government, and the future of computing and technology.

Professional experience