Thomas Zacharia

Thomas Zacharia (born 1957 in Kerala, India) is an Indian American computational scientist. He is well-known for his research in computational materials science particularly focused on marangoni effect in solidification processes. His current research is concerned primarily with petascale computing and its application to grand challenge problems. He is currently the Associate Laboratory Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vice President of Science and Technology at the University of Tennessee and Professor at Georgia Tech's College of Computing.

As global energy challenges and global warming warnings grow more dire, Zacharia is leading his scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and industry to develop technologies to address energy technologies and climate change. Under his leadership, scientific computing is evolving into what DOE's Under Secretary for Science, Ray Orbach, was terming a "third leg of science." Researchers are taking advantage of the new computing power to break through the barriers of what time and resources simply didn't allow with older, slower technology. With data- and variable-intensive problems such as climate modeling or simulating the performance of new nuclear weapon designs, science was driving the development of massively parallel computing. Currently, at 119 Trillion calculations per second, Zacharia and his team manages the fastest open-science supercomputers available to the scientific community. Zacharia is leading a team working with Cray to build a 1000 trillion calculations per second computer that will be available to the scientific community in 2008.

The science of the 21st century demands computational capability well beyond what is available today. Breakthrough science and engineering requires an architecture well suited for scientific applications, a computational environment that ensures effective utilization of that architecture for scientific discovery, a best-in-class communications network and data management infrastructure, and teams of leading experts applying this capability to critical research challenges. Zacharia leads the U.S. Department of Energy National Center for Computational Sciences, a state-of-the-art facility for computer science and computational sciences research. The Center was recently named as the site for the National Leadership Computing Facility, which will, in the words of Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, "deliver major research breakthroughs, significant technological innovations, medical and health advances, enhanced economic competitiveness, and improved quality of life for the American people." The expansion will put the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and University of Tennessee at the center of the world's push for alternative fuels and the reduction of global warming.

Zacharia and his team provides petascale computers to all scientific researchers and research organizations, including industry. For example, 50% of the U.S. contribution to the IPCC modeling and simulations were provided by Zacharia's team.

Awards, honors, and professional activities

*Fellow, American Welding Society, 2005
*ORNL Workforce Diversity Award, 2001
*ORNL Leader of the Year Award, 2000
*ORNL Leadership Award, 2000
*Award of Merit in Technical Communication, Society for Technical Communications, 1999
*Lockheed Martin Energy Research President's Award, 1999
*A. F. Davis Silver Medal Award, American Welding Society, 1999
*Distinguished Lecture Award, Nanchang University, China, 1996
*Martin Marietta Energy Systems Technical Achievement Award, 1995
*William Spraragen Award, American Welding Society, 1995 and 1989
*Champion H. Mathewson Award (co-author citation), American Society for Metals, 1994
*Department of Energy Advanced Technology Award, 1993
*Advisory Board, College of Engineering, and Computer Science
*Advisory Board, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 2003-present
*High-Performance Computing Advisory Board, Pellissippi State Technical Community College, 2003-present
*Advisory Board, Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems, Georgia Tech, 2003-present
*Member, System of Laboratories Computing Coordinating Committee (SLCC), 2000-present
*Member, Steering Committee, Energy Sciences Network Research Committee, 2000-present
*Member, School of Computational Science and Information Technology Review Board, Florida State University, 1999-present
*Adjunct Faculty, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1997-present
*Visiting Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, 1995-1996
*Adjunct Faculty, Clarkson University, Potsdam, New York, 1991-present