Dr. Michela Taufer has devoted her career to making high performance computing an open, shared resource that helps scientists everywhere move their work forward. At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, she holds the Jack Dongarra Professorship in High Performance Computing and directs the Global Computing Laboratory.
Taufer wears many hats. She leads a research group focused on scalable, reproducible, and explainable HPC and AI workflows for scientific discovery. She also heads national projects such as the National Science Data Fabric. She works with U.S. national labs, international partners, and industry to design tomorrow’s computing systems, and she teaches and mentors students at every level in these skills. As a member of the Computing Community Consortium, she also helps set national goals for computing research and represents the HPC community in cross-disciplinary initiatives.
Taufer’s introduction to HPC began during her doctoral work at ETH Zurich, where her path was shaped by a desire to bridge computational and experimental sciences and enable impactful discovery across disciplines. “From my doctoral work at ETH Zurich on performance analysis of distributed computing to my postdoctoral research at UC San Diego and The Scripps Research Institute, I have consistently sought to connect advanced computing capabilities with real-world scientific challenges,” she told HPCwire. Taufer’s background in computer engineering and computer science, along with decades of collaborations with scientists in physics, biology, Earth sciences, and beyond, has anchored her belief that HPC should be a democratizing force, accessible to and usable by all who seek to advance discovery.
That drive for openness soon expanded to reproducibility. Taufer launched the SC Reproducibility Initiative in 2015, introducing artifact description and evaluation processes that later became ACM and IEEE standards. She also secured open access for SC proceedings, embedding transparency into the conference record.
As hardware evolved, Taufer focused on performance portability and workflow automation. Her team developed adaptive, hardware-aware optimizations for production codes such as VPIC and MuMMI, helping applications sustain speed from GPUs to exascale systems while keeping results explainable and repeatable. As a co-lead of the NSF’s National Science Data Fabric, she has built a federated, FAIR-compliant infrastructure that links HPC, cloud, and experimental facilities so researchers can analyze multi-petabyte datasets without bulk transfers, lowering barriers to data-intensive science and accelerating time-to-discovery.
Taufer’s community service matches her technical output. She chaired SC19, curated the technical program for ISC 2024, and has served as an SC Steering Committee member, IEEE Computer Society Treasurer, ACM SIGHPC Vice Chair, and Editor-in-Chief of Future Generation Computer Systems. Mentorship is central to Taufer’s work: Through the Global Computing Lab she has advised 20 postgraduates, 40 graduate students, and 50 undergraduates, many from underrepresented backgrounds. Taufer says these engagements have reinforced the value of inclusive, community-driven science and shown her how the most enduring advances come from building both technology and people.
Her contributions have been recognized with the 2025 HPDC Achievement Award for her pioneering contributions to volunteer computing, as well as election as a 2024 AAAS Fellow for advances in reproducibility in HPC. She received the 2022 IEEE TCPP Outstanding Service and Contributions Award and the 2021 R&D 100 Award for the Flux workload-management framework. She was named the 2015 ACM Distinguished Scientist and an HPCwire Person to Watch in 2019.
A highlight for Taufer has been seeing her early work in reproducibility now embedded as a community standard for computer science conferences and watching former students adopt these principles.
“I remain driven by the belief that HPC is not just about speed—it’s about trust, transparency, and enabling all voices in science to contribute to global problem-solving.”