Richard J. Hanson

Richard J. Hanson   

C/O Visual Numerics

2500 Wilcrest Drive
Suite 200
Houston, Texas 77042

E-Mail: richard.koolhans@gmail.com

 


Goals| Experience| Skills| Employment| Education| Activities| Publications

Career Goals

Lead projects that build applications using a high-performance distributed or multi-threaded computing environment. The current standard tools for this work will be combined with my background in scientific and numerical software to achieve these goals.

Recent Professional Experience

Throughout my career in academia, government laboratories, and industry I have pursued the common goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in numerical analysis and mathematical software to solve significant problems in applied mathematics, utilizing the full potential of available computing hardware.

At Rice University, Center for High Performance Software Research, I was the University Lead for the DoD/PET Modernization program. A significant accomplishment coming from this work was the writing of an interface to POSIX threads, using standard Fortran 95. This work makes it possible for Fortran programmers to have easy access to thread technology without writing codes in two languages. This capability will often result in major performance improvements and can make possible new approaches to problem solving.

At IMSL (now VNI) I assumed major project responsibility, including technical supervision, project management, and involvement in the full cycle of software development. Early IMSL projects included notable improvements in the IMSL real, symmetric, dense eigenvalue-eigenvector code, from which (given the right environment) an order of magnitude speed-up is obtained compared with LAPACK.

Some of the most professionally challenging work of my career began in 1992, with design and implemention of a new object-oriented interface for mathematical software libraries made possible by ISO Fortran 90. This consists of defined operators and generic functions in standard Fortran 90, and also interfaces with the IMSL Fortran 77 libraries. The use of innovative Fortran 90 features in these codes led to their being used extensively by hardware vendors as rigorous tests of new Fortran 90 compilers under development. This IMSL MP Library is widely available with Compaq Visual Fortran (Professional Version), as well as in many other compilers.

Some of my most recent significant work was to design and implement MPI-enhanced subroutines and functions for scientific applications on distributed network computers. The IMSL Distributed Network Fortran Library (DNFL) was developed on arrays of workstations, and is so far available for the IBM SP-2, Hitachi SR2201, and Cray T3E.

Skills

Specific skills include:

Employment History

Senior Principal Scientist, 2004-Present

            Visual Numerics, Inc. (IMSL, Inc.), Houston, TX

Research Scientist, 1999-2004

Rice University, HiPerSoft, Houston, TX

Senior Principal Scientist, 1989-1999

Visual Numerics, Inc. (IMSL, Inc.), Houston, TX

Principal Scientist, 1987-1989

Applied Dynamics International, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI

Member of the Technical Staff, 1976-1987

(Numerical Mathematics Division, 1976-1983)
(Applied Mathematics Division, 1983-1987)
Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM

Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, 1972-1976

(Promoted to Professor, May 1976)
Washington State University, Pullman, WA

Member of the Technical Staff, 1966-1972

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA

Assistant Professor of Mathematics, 1964-1966

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA

Education

PhD in Mathematics

University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
Thesis: Reduction and Classification of Certain Turning Point Problems for Systems
Advisor: Wolfgang R. Wasow

MS in Mathematics

Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
Thesis: Long Range Regulation of a Hydroelectric System with Storage Dams

BS in Mathematics

Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR

Selected Professional Activities

IFIP WG 2.5 Committee on Mathematical Software, 1983-present

Appointed for significant contributions to the publication of mathematics software. Ongoing participation in committee projects which monitor and improve mathematical software tools, languages, and working environments. Most recent project: implementation of standard Fortran interface to floating-point exception handling.

Co-chairman of the IFIP WG 2.5 Working Conference of Aspects of Computation on Asynchronous Parallel Processors, Stanford, CA, August, 1988.

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Member

ACM and ACM/SIGNUM, Member

Associate Editor, ACM-TOMS, 1988-2001.
Editor-in-Chief, Collected Algorithms from ACM (CALGO), 1983-1988.
Algorithms Editor, ACM-TOMS, Oct. 1980-1988.
Scientific Applications Editor, Comm. of the ACM, 1973-1978.
Organizer of ACM-SIGNUM Meeting on Mathematical Software, Albuquerque, NM, 1977.
Secretary-Treasurer, ACM-SIGNUM, 1975-1978.
Co-founder of Rio Grande chapter, ACM-SIGNUM, 1976.

Research Papers, Books and Significant Articles

One technical book, two software books, 30 research papers and articles, and over 25 technical reports. For a complete list of this work click here.

Richard Hanson (richard.koolhans@gmail.com) Updated 24 April 2007