Dr Mike Heroux is a Scientist in Residence at CSB/SJU. This position enables him to share with us his wealth of knowledge and experience as a world-class scientist in the areas of numerical methods and high-performance computing. Dr. Heroux teaches one course each semester in the computer science department and mentors several CSB/SJU student researchers while also working full-time for Sandia National Laboratories on projects involving the use of high-performance computing for scientific and engineering purposes. (Sandia National Laboratories is located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but Prof. Heroux works from his home and office in Minnesota.)

Prof Heroux hires a steady stream of students, usually beginning in the summer before the student's junior year and continuing to graduation. These students work on various research projects, some designed locally by faculty here and some projects directly related to Dr. Heroux's research for Sandia National Laboratories. Some of these research students have had the opportunity to spend a summer internship at the laboratory in Albuquerque, and several students have continued on to graduate school after working with Dr. Heroux.

For his research, Prof Heroux uses two high performance parallel computing systems. The largest system contains 48 CPU cores and a high-end GPU accelerator. Combined system performance is more than 3 trillion operations per second. These machines are available for student researchers and are also used by faculty and students as part of upper division coursework. The parallel computing hardware is updated regularly to use current technology.