Dr. Richard D. Loft


Title:

Manager, Computational Science Section,
Scientific Computing Division ,
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Boulder, Colorado 80307-3000

Education:

B. S., Chemistry, Harvey Mudd College, 1977

M. S., Physics, University of Colorado, 1984

Ph. D., Physics, University of Colorado, 1988

Awards and Honors:

Honorable Mention, Special Category, IEEE Gordon Bell Award, 2001.

Professional History:

1989-1994, Application Engineer, Thinking Machines Corporation.

1994-2002, Software Engineer IV, National Center for Atmospheric Research.

2002-present, Manager, Computational Science Section, SCD, NCAR

Relevant Experience:

Dr. Loft has been involved with parallel computing since joining Thinking Machine Corporation as an Application Engineer for NCAR in 1989. Throughout his career he has contributed to the understanding and effective use of parallelism as applied to grand challenge climate simulations. He parallelized NCAR’s Community Climate Model (CCM-2) using data parallel CM Fortran for the Connection Machine (CM-2 and CM-5) supercomputers. Dr Loft has been involved with application development for Beowulf technology since 1997. He has created an efficient 3-d spectral dynamical core called Built on Beowulf (BOB). BOB out performs CCM-3 by a factor of five on certain tests, and has been used to study jet formation on Jupiter.

Dr. Loft’s career has been driven by an interest in the interplay of algorithms, software design and optimization techniques to achieve flexible, high performance modeling capabilities. Dr Loft, along with CSS collaborators, developed an efficient spectral element based primitive equations core on the cubed-sphere. This work was recognized with an honorable mention prize in the IEEE/ACM Gordon Bell competition at Supercomputing 2001. Most recently, Dr. Loft has taken an interest in advancing the capabilities of end-to-end biogeochemistry models such as Biome-BGC and the PCTM models, which was used for the global carbon cycle forecast component at the C-DAS meeting held in May of 2002 at NCAR.