Biography

  Dr. James P. Ahrens is the Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Information Science and Technology Institute. 

He received in B.S. in computer science in 1989 from the University of Massachusetts, a M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington in 1992 and 1996. He became a Technical Staff Member in the High-Performance Computing division at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1996. 

Dr. Ahrens is well-known as the founder and design lead of ParaView, an open-source visualization tool designed to handle extremely large data.  ParaView is broadly used for scientific visualization, has been downloaded almost three million times, and is in use worldwide at supercomputing centers, national laboratories, universities, and industry. The number of downloads of ParaView has increased on average by thirteen thousand downloads per year for the past twenty years. Dr. Ahrens researched, designed, and developed the key abstractions, approaches and algorithms that support the visualization and analysis of massive scientific data on supercomputers. His work has stood the test of time. Dr. Ahrens research work has been cited over eight thousand times on topics including large scale scientific visualization, rendering, compression, in situ and image-based approaches.  

Dr. Ahrens has over thirty-one research awards as principal investigator/project lead from across program offices in the Department of Energy. These projects have evolved in scope over the course of his career to multi-million dollar, interdisciplinary projects involving multiple laboratory and academic partners. Dr. Ahrens is recognized for his leadership role as the U.S. DOE Exascale Computing Project’s Data and Visualization lead for seven storage, data management and visualization supercomputing software projects including efforts to make high-impact packages such as HDF5, ParaView, Visit, and MPI-IO exascale-ready. Industry partners such as NVIDIA and Intel have delivered their hardware-accelerated volume rendering (NVIDIA Index) and raytracing (Intel OSPRay) advances in ParaView. 

Dr. Ahrens’s expertise is sought by laboratory leadership and academia, for example, he was co-chair of the LANL IS&T LDRD Directed Research science committee for the past three years, provided regular briefing on data management for AI/ML, and was an associated editor for the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Dr. Ahrens is a Fellow of the IEEE Visualization Graphics Technical Community (VTGC) Visualization Academy and recipient of the IEEE Golden Core Member Service Award. 

Dr. Ahrens provides leadership to the international visualization and computer graphics community. From 2019-2022, he was the elected chair of the IEEE VGTC, the governance body that oversees and sponsors all IEEE visualization and virtual reality conferences. Dr. Ahrens is an international authority on visualization and data science, has published 140 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters, and has received multiple best paper awards.