Gerhard Klimeck is a German-American scientist and author in the field of nanotechnology. He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a fellow of IEEE. He is the Reilly Director of the Center for Predictive Materials and Devices, the Director of nanoHUB, the Network for Computational Nanotechnology at Purdue University, and a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He guides the technical developments and strategies of nanoHUB.org which annually serves over 1.5 million users worldwide with online simulations, tutorials, and seminars.
Klimeck's research interest is in the modeling of nanoelectronic devices, parallel cluster computing, genetic algorithms, and parallelimage processing. He has been driving the development of the Nanoelectronic Modeling Tool NEMO since 1994. Klimeck was the Technical Group Supervisor of the High Performance Computing Group and a Principal Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Previously, he was a member of technical staff at the Central Research Lab of Texas Instruments where he served as manager and principal architect of the Nanoelectronic Modeling program. At JPL and Purdue, Klimeck developed the Nanoelectronic Modeling Tool for multi-million atom simulations. NEMO 1-D was the first quantitative simulation tool for resonant tunneling diodes and 1D heterostructures. NEMO 3-D was the first multi-million atom electronic structure code and has been used to quantitatively model optical properties of self-assembled quantum dots, disordered Si/SiGe systems, and single impurities in silicon. NEMO is based on the representation of the nanoelectronic device with atomistic empirical tight-binding. Quantitative device modeling was demonstrated without any material parameter adjustments, just by entry of geometrical structure parameters. At Purdue his group is developing a new simulation engine that combines the NEMO 1-D and NEMO 3-D capabilities into new codes entitled OMEN and NEMO5. NEMO 1-D was demonstrated to scale up to 23,000 parallel processors, NEMO 3-D was demonstrated to scale to 8,192 processors, and OMEN was demonstrated to scale to 222,720 processors.
Klimeck won 9 NASA Tech Briefs from 2004–2007, various NASA Software and Space Awards and Dr. Edward Stone Award for Outstanding Research Publication 2002
in genetic and evolutionary programming– the “HUMIES”, $1,000 shared with Richard J. Terrile, Hrand Aghazarian, Michael I. Ferguson, Wolfgang Fink, Terry Huntsberger, Didier Keymeulen, Gerhard Klimeck, Mark Kordon, Seungwon Lee, Boris Oks, Chris Peay,Anastassios Petropoulos, Paul von Allmen. Karl Yee, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, paper titles: “Evolutionary Computation Technologies for the Automatic Design of Space Systems”, “Evolutionary Computation applied to the Tuning of MEMS gyroscopes”, “Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms for Low-Thrust Orbit Transfer Optimization”
2008 Purdue Engineering Team Award shared with Mark S. Lundstrom and Michael McLennan
2011 Gordon Bell Prize Competition Finalist, Received Honorable Mention: Mathieu Luisier, Timothy B. Boykin, , Wolfgang Fichtner, “Atomistic nanoelectronic device engineering with sustained performances up to 1.44 PFlop/s”, IEEE and ACM Supercomputing 2011, Nov 12-18, 2011
Klimeck was interviewed by Claire Stirm, a HUB Liaison from HUBzero, about nanoHUB and his career. The interview was conducted at Purdue University.
Selected works
Krishna Madhavan, Michael Zentner, , "Learning and research in the cloud" Published online 7 November 2013, Nature Nanotechnology 8, 786–789 ;doi:10.1038/nnano.2013.231
Martin Fuechsle, Jill Miwa, Suddhasatta Mahapatra, Hoon Ryu, Sunhee Lee, Oliver Warschkow, Lloyd Hollenberg, , Michelle Simmons, "A single-atom transistor" Nature Nanotechnology, 19 February 2012;doi: 10.1038/NNANO.2012.21
Bent Weber, Suddhasatta Mahapatra, Hoon Ryu, Sunhee Lee, A. Fuhrer, T. Reusch, D. Thompson, W. C. T. Lee, , Lloyd Hollenberg, Michelle Simmons, "Ohm's Law Survives to the Atomic Scale" Science 335, 64 ;doi: 10.1126/science.1214319
, Michael McLennan, Sean Brophy, George Adams III., Mark Lundstrom, "nanoHUB.org: Advancing Education and Research in Nanotechnology" IEEE Computers in Engineering and Science, Vol. 10, pg. 17-23 ;doi:10.1109/MCSE.2008.120
, Fabiano Oyafuso, Timothy Boykin, R. Bowen, Paul Allmen, "Development of a Nanoelectronic 3-D Simulator for Multimillion Atom Simulations and Its Application to Alloyed Quantum Dots " Computer Modeling in Engineering and Science Volume 3, No. 5 pp 601–642
, Roger Lake, R. Bowen, William Frensley, Ted Moise, "Quantum Device Simulation with a Generalized Tunneling Formula" Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 67, p. 2539 ;doi : 10.1063/1.114451
