Koumoutsakos recognized for contribution to high performance computing

Petros Koumoutsakos, the Herbert S. Winokur, Jr. Professor of Computing in Science and Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been awarded the Excellence Award in High Performance Computing (HPC) from the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE).

The award recognizes Koumoutsakos for “seminal contributions in the area of high-performance computing and his foundational work on the development of advanced modeling techniques coupled with innovations in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning.”

Awarded for the first time in 2022, the PRACE HPC Excellence Award recognizes an outstanding individual or team for ground-breaking research using high-performance computing, that leads to significant advances in any research field. 

Koumoutsakos’ research focuses on the fundamentals and applications of computing and AI to understand, predict and optimize fluid flows in engineering, nanotechnology, and medicine. In recent years, his work has investigated a range of topics including blood flows, virus traffic, nanoscale fluid flows and schooling fish behavior. His work coupling advances in machine learning with state-of-the-art scientific computing has improved turbulence modeling and could have applications spanning in aerodynamics to climate modeling.

At SEAS, Koumoutsakos serves as Area Chair for Applied Mathematics. He received his PhD at the California Institute of Technology, where he studied Aeronautics and Applied Mathematics. Koumoutsakos is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the American Physical Society (APS) and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). He is recipient of the Advanced Investigator Award by the European Research Council and  the ACM Gordon Bell prize in Supercomputing. He is an International Member to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE).