Dr. Kirk E. Jordan

Biography

Dr. Kirk E. Jordan is the Emerging Solutions Executive in IBM’s Deep Computing organization within the Systems and Technology Group’s Strategic Growth Business unit. In this role, he has responsibility for overseeing development of applications for IBM’s advanced computing architectures, investigating and developing concepts for new areas of growth for IBM especially in the life sciences involving high performance computing, providing leadership in high-end computing and simulation in such areas as systems biology and high-end visualization and is the Deep Computing technical representative to IBM’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Industry unit. Prior to moving to IBM’s Deep Computing group, he was the team lead for the Healthcare and Life Sciences Strategic Relationships and Institutes of Innovation Programs focused at universities, government research laboratories and non-profit research institutes. In the Healthcare and Life Sciences organization, he formed the NEBioGrid with IBM and institutions in the Boston area, carried out an assessment of system biology for IBM, and led efforts in modeling of tumor growth. He has also held a position in IBM’s Corporate University Relations Group in the scientific and technical areas especially in high performance computing and high performance visualization. He managed IBM’s SUR (Shared University Research) Program, and was responsible for building and enhancing relations between IBM and key university researchers world wide while maintaining his visibility as a computational applied mathematician in the high performance computing community.

Jordan received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Delaware . He has had more than 20 years experience in high performance and parallel computing having held positions at Exxon Research and Engineering, Thinking Machines and Kendall Square Research before joining IBM. He has been involved with performance analysis and tuning of scientific programs, new techniques for distributed visualization, and the development of algorithms to exploit massively parallel architectures. At Exxon Research and Engineering (ERE), he worked on numerical methods for the computer simulation of physical phenomena and served as ERE's supercomputing technical coordinator. He has held a Department of Energy Technology Exchange Grant at Argonne National Laboratory and been active on national scientific committees on supercomputing issues. Currently, he is Vice President for Industry in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and he serves on SIAM 's Committee for Science Policy. He received several awards for his work on supercomputers.

Jordan 's main research interests lie in the efficient use of advanced architecture computers for modeling and simulation, primarily in the area of numerical solutions of partial differential equations arising from large-scale scientific computing problems. He is currently interested in applying simulation and modeling techniques in the area of systems biology as evidenced by his collaborations on tumor modeling and heart simulations. He has developed parallel codes such as Fast Fourier Transforms and diffusion filters that have been used in image analysis. He has authored numerous papers on performance analysis of advanced computer architectures and investigated methods that exploit these architectures. Among the areas he has published in include, interactive visualization on parallel computers, parallel domain decomposition for reservoir/groundwater simulation, turbulent convection flows, parallel spectral methods, multigrid techniques, multi-resolution wavelets and wave propagation.