LLNL’s Yang honored among 2024 SIAM Class of Fellows

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) announced the selection of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) computational mathematician Ulrike Meier Yang as one of the 2024 Class of SIAM Fellows, the highest honor the organization bestows on its members.

Yang, who leads the Mathematical Algorithms and Computing group in LLNL’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC), was recognized for her pioneering work on parallel algebraic multigrid and software, and broad impact on high-performance computing. Yang and the rest of the 26 new SIAM Fellows were nominated for their outstanding research and service to the community and represent a “crucial group of individuals helping to advance the fields of applied mathematics, computational science and data science,” according to the organization.

“I am very honored and grateful to be named a SIAM Fellow and to join such a prestigious group of experts in applied mathematics and computational science,” Yang said. “This would not have been possible without the support, encouragement and collaborative efforts of many colleagues over the years. I also want to thank SIAM for acknowledging my work and impact on the community.”

 Throughout her career, Yang’s research interest has been on the development of numerical algorithms for parallel computers, their implementation into efficient software and performance analysis on such architectures. Yang joined LLNL in 1998, where she has developed scalable linear solvers, with a focus on parallel algebraic multigrid methods, and the associated software to support application codes. She is a software developer for the hypre linear solvers library, which won an R&D 100 Award in 2007, and the primary software architect of BoomerAMG, hypre’s most used solver and preconditioner.

From 2020-2023, Yang led the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Development Kit (xSDK) project for the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) and the hypre-ECP project aimed at porting hypre to exascale computers. She currently heads the Linear and Nonlinear Solvers Topical Area for the SciDAC FASTMath Institute and the SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing.

Yang also has served as editor for several leading journals, including the SIAM Journal for Matrix Analysis and Applications, the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing and the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. She has been a member of SIAM’s Board of Trustees since 2023 and the SIAM Committee on Programs and Conferences since 2022.

Prior to coming to LLNL, Yang worked for the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1985-1995) and in the Central Institute of Applied Mathematics at the Jülich Research Centre in Germany (1983-1985). She earned her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995 and a diploma in mathematics at the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany in 1983.

Incorporated in 1952, SIAM is the largest scientific society devoted to applied mathematics and computational science, boasting more than 14,000 members worldwide. The nonprofit organization aims to advance the application of mathematics and computational science to engineering, industry, science and society, promote research that will lead to effective new mathematical and computational methods and techniques, and facilitate the exchange of information and ideas among mathematicians, engineers and scientists through publications, research and community, according to the organization’s website.

For more, visit SIAM Fellows Program.