OpenMP ARB Appoints Duncan Poole of NVIDIA and Kathryn O’Brien of IBM to its Board of Directors

Austin, Texas — May 24, 2017 –  The OpenMP ARB, a group of leading hardware and software vendors and research organizations which creates the OpenMP standard parallel programming specification, has appointed Duncan Poole and Kathryn O’Brien to its Board of Directors. They bring a wealth of experience to the OpenMP ARB.

Duncan Poole is director of platform alliances for NVIDIA’s Accelerated Computing Division. He is responsible for driving partnerships where engineering interfaces are adopted by external parties who are building tools for accelerated computing. Duncan is also the president of OpenACC, and responsible for NVIDIA’s membership of OpenMP.  His goal is to encourage the adoption of accelerators by developers who want good performance and portability of their accelerated code.

Kathryn O’Brien is a Principal Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where she has worked for over 25 years. She managed the compiler team that implemented OpenMP on the CELL heterogeneous architecture. Since that time she has been heavily engaged in the adoption of OpenMP across a range of product and research compiler efforts. Over the last 8 years she has been part of the leadership team driving IBM Research’s Exascale program, where her focus has been on the evolution and development of the broader software programming and tools environment.

“Duncan and Kathryn bring us great experience”, says Partha Tirumalai, Chairman of the OpenMP Board of Directors. “We are very pleased to have them join the OpenMP board.”

In addition to Duncan and Kathryn, the board of directors of the OpenMP ARB consists of Partha Tirumalai of Oracle, Sanjiv Shah of Intel, and Josh Simons of VMware.