| EDITORIAL: In Memoriam |
| Final Farewell to Dr. Ed Oliver |
| Ed Oliver, former Associate Director of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), died on July 22 in Washington, DC, following a battle with liver cancer. |
| Many remember Ed both personally and professionally during his tenure at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the 1990s, and later as a colleague who in many ways laid the groundwork for SciDAC and Leadership Computing at DOE. |
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| Dr. Ed Oliver |
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| A native of Anniston, AL, Ed received his doctorate in mathematics in 1969 from the University of Alabama as a NASA fellow. He held research and management positions at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and at DOE. He held faculty appointments at six universities and was active in national and international professional societies. |
| Before his appointment as ACSR Associate Director in 1999, Ed worked in the Office of Energy Research (now the Office of Science) where he was a leader in the development of the Scientific Simulation Initiative, which evolved into the current SciDAC program. The success enjoyed by SciDAC over the years is due in no small measure to Ed. |
| Ed arrived at ORNL in 1990 at the invitation of Director Alvin Trivelpiece and was assigned the task of invigorating the Laboratory's computational program. During those years, Ed, who was by training a mathematician, was among the first in Oak Ridge to recognize the research potential of advanced scientific computing. He was instrumental in establishing the National Center for Computational Sciences, which featured the Intel Paragon, the first of a series of state-of-the-art supercomputers that are the ancestors of today's petaflops machines. |
| With Ed's encouragement, the Center made those early massively-parallel, high-performance computing resources available to many researchers, including me—who in the mid-1990s was developing massively parallel computational mechanics simulations of lightweight materials and its impact on crashworthiness of automobiles. |
| It was Ed Oliver's vision that ORNL would one day be the world leader in scientific computing with a commitment to solving some of the most compelling problems that face humanity. In many respects Ed set the high expectations that drove the U.S. renaissance in supercomputing. I would like to think that he is proud of what we have accomplished. |
| Ed was a man of few words and when he spoke, we learned to listen. It was Ed who convinced me to leave my research and take on the leadership of computing at ORNL. He called me into his office one day and said, "...Well, we could not find anyone who would take the job. I want you to become the Division Director of Computer Science and Mathematics Division. Most likely, it will go under in six months. Don't worry, I will find you another job; if not at ORNL, at some other laboratory." Ed recognized the potential in many people and gave them opportunities that they could not have imagined. |
| Ed helped initiate Adventures in Supercomputing, a program to reach out to students in high school. Ed said, "It's not just for computer wonks anymore, and it doesn't take long to figure out that it should be made accessible, for example, to students everywhere. And if that happens, it's going to be quite a challenge figuring out how best to take advantage." It was not clear that he was thinking about Myspace and Facebook. |
| In a world of machines and algorithms, Ed was known at ORNL for his sense of humor and a genuine regard for his employees. He once spent his own money on a ping-pong table for a group of staff members who—he thought—lacked sufficient recreational facilities. The ping-pong table is still at ORNL. |
| He carried the same grace and commitment to Washington. His vision for scientific computing was being borne out, certainly faster than he imagined a decade earlier, by the accelerating advances in computing technology and by the simultaneous emergence of the Internet as a revolutionary communications medium. By the time of his retirement, scientific computing was indeed fusing theory and experiment, as DOE's Under Secretary for Science Raymond Orbach expressed it, "as the third leg of scientific discovery." |
For SciDAC, Ed was central to the vision and the journey that we have embraced and through which significant scientific achievement has emerged. He will be missed.
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Contributor:
Dr. Thomas Zacharia, Associate Laboratory Director, Computing and Computational Sciences, ORNL
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