Hakizumwami Birali Runesha

As associate vice president for research computing and director of the Research Computing Center, Dr. Hakizumwami Birali Runesha provides leadership and vision for advancing all aspects of research computing strategies at the University. He is responsible for the design, configuration, and administration of the centrally managed high-performance computing (HPC) systems and related services across the University of Chicago. In addition, he provides access to advanced technical expertise, user support, advice, and training to the research community.

Dr. Runesha is a seasoned professional who brings to the University of Chicago HPC management leadership and more than 20 years of experience in high-performance computing and scientific software development. He earned his MS and Ph.D. in civil engineering at Old Dominion University. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, he served as director of scientific computing and applications at the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI), managing the scientific computing, biological computing, visualization, and application development groups. In addition to overseeing the strategic planning of HPC resources and leading the annual procurement of supercomputing resources at MSI, Dr. Runesha created the MSI Application software development group and the MSI Scientific Data Management Laboratory to meet the evolving data management and database development needs of university researchers.

Dr. Runesha has developed open-source software programs and fast parallel solvers for large-scale finite element applications. He served as principal investigator on a number of research grants and is the author of a many journal articles, proceedings, and conference papers. He has given many invited talks, seminars, courses, and workshops on various HPC topics.

Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, Dr. Runesha was a research scholar at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology developing parallel computing algorithms for engineering applications, a research associate for the Multidisciplinary Parallel-Vector Computer Center at Old Dominion University, and an assistant professor at the University of Kinshasa.