Senior Research Scientist
Applied Mathematics and Computational Science
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
2024 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling — Winning Team
2022 ACM Gordon Bell Prize — Finalist
IEEE Senior Member
ISI Elected Member
The Ohio State University Alumnus
Google Scholar · CV · GitHub · LinkedIn
Contact: sameh(dot)abdulah(at)Kaust(dot)edu(dot)sa
I am a Senior Research Scientist in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science at KAUST. My work connects high-performance computing, statistical modeling, and machine learning to build scalable, energy-efficient, and uncertainty-aware methods for climate and environmental applications.
I co-founded the High-Performance Statistical Computing (HPSC) initiative and lead development within the ExaGeoStat research and software ecosystem. My research spans Gaussian processes, mixed-precision numerical methods, GPU acceleration, exascale climate emulation, and federated and decentralized spatial inference.
I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2016. Earlier publications appeared under the name Sameh Shohdy.
November 30, 2026, 6:00–7:30 p.m. (Saudi Arabia, UTC+3): Introduction to High-Performance Statistical Computing (Free Seminar) — ISI Academy live webinar on Instats, presented with Mary Lai Salvaña and chaired by Nalini Ravishanker, with contributions from Marc Genton and Yan Song. An introduction to scalable statistical algorithms and modern computing architectures for reliable inference. Details and free registration.
November 16, 2026: Co-Chair, Organizer, and Session Chair of High Performance Computing for Environmental and Earth Sciences (HPC4EES) at SC26, Chicago, USA. Workshop presentation.
November 19, 2026: SC26 Birds of a Feather: Watts, FLOPs, and Impact: Rethinking Energy in the Exascale Era, Chicago, USA.
November 19, 2026: Co-author of the SC26 paper Cross-Layer Energy Analysis of Multimodal Training on Grace Hopper Superchips, Chicago, USA.
2027: Algorithms Track Co-Chair, SuperComputing India (SCI27).
All news and announcements, including earlier activities, listed with the latest updates first.
November 2026: Our paper, “RCOMPSs: A Scalable Runtime System for R Code Execution on Manycore Systems,” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. Read the preprint.
November 2026: Joined the program committee of the 41st ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS 2027).
October 2026: I will give an invited talk in the session “Next-Generation Methods for Scalable Environmental Spatial Data Science” at JSM 2027 in Chicago.
October 2026: Invited to serve as a Technical Papers session chair at SC26, Chicago, USA. Conference program.
October 2026: Invited to serve on the paper committee for the Machine Learning and AI track at Supercomputing Asia (SCA) 2027.
September 2026: IASC–ISI announced the HPSC Community Hub online seminar series.
August 2026: I gave an invited talk, High-Performance Federated and Distributed Modeling of Spatial Data at Scale, at MVAPICH MUG in Columbus, Ohio, USA.
August 2026: I gave an invited talk, An Introduction to High-Performance Statistical Computing (HPSC), at JSM 2026 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
July 2026: Started the funded FedAir-KSA project as Co-Principal Investigator, developing GPU-accelerated decentralized spatial intelligence for real-time air-pollution mapping from low-cost sensors.
2026: I was elected a Member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI).
April 2026: High-Performance Statistical Computing: Why the Future of Statistics Is Parallel appeared in ASA StatTrak.
March 2026: At SIAM PP26 in Berlin, Germany, I gave an invited talk on Asynchronous Federated Spatial Modeling with Low-Rank Gaussian Processes and organized minisymposia on Matrix Computations and Scientific Applications and Scalable Statistical Methods for Large-Scale Data Analysis.
January 2026: I was elevated to IEEE Senior Member.
January 2026: I gave an invited talk, Energy-Efficient and Sustainable Spatial Modeling Using Mixed-Precision Computing, at KAUST AMCS-STAT.
November 2025: I co-organized the Student Cluster Competition (SCC and IndySCC) at SC25.
September 2025: I taught at the ICTP Advanced School on High-Performance Computing and Applied AI for High-Resolution Regional Climate Modeling, September 8–19, at UM6P in Ben Guerir, Morocco, and gave the keynote Boosting Earth System Models: Saving Petabytes with Exascale Emulators.
September 2025: I gave an invited ICL Friday Lunch Talk in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA: Scaling Spatial Data Modeling with Batched Linear Algebra: A MAGMA-Based Solution.
August 2025: At JSM in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, I presented Efficient Statistical Computing with Mixed-Precision Power and GPU Acceleration. I also gave the invited MVAPICH MUG talk Scalable Spatial Statistical Approximations as Emerging MPI Workloads.
April 2025: I taught Large-Scale Spatial Data Science and gave an invited talk on Leveraging Approximation Techniques for Sustainable Large-Scale Spatial Statistical Computing at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh.
March 2025: I gave an invited talk, GPU-Accelerated Vecchia Algorithms for Scalable Gaussian Process Modeling, and organized the minisymposium Matrix Computations and Scientific Applications at SIAM CSE25.
January 2025: I began my appointment as Senior Research Scientist in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science at KAUST.
November 2024: Our team won the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling for Boosting Earth System Model Outputs and Saving Petabytes in Storage Using Exascale Climate Emulators at SC24 in Atlanta, USA.
November 2024: I gave the invited MVAPICH booth talk Accelerating Geospatial Data Modeling Applications with MVAPICH at SC24.
(September 2024) Our paper, "Efficient Large-scale Nonstationary Spatial Covariance Function Estimation Using Convolutional Neural Networks," has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics.
(August 2024) Do not miss my talk at Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE, "Boosting Earth System Models: Saving Petabytes with Exascale Emulators and Parallel Mixed-Precision Linear Algebra on GPUs." Thanks, Prof. Mohamed Riahi, for the invitation!
(August 2024) Do not miss my MUG, Columbus, OH, US talk: "Sustainable Climate/Weather Modeling on Manycore Systems." Thanks, Prof. DK Panda, for the invitation!
(August 2024) Do not miss my talk at MIT, US: "Boosting Earth System Models: Saving Petabytes with Exascale Emulators and Parallel Mixed-Precision Linear Algebra on GPUs." Thanks, Rabab Alomairy, for the invitation!
(August 2024) KAUST News highlighted our nomination for the Gordon Bell Prize (Climate Track) 2024, https://www.kaust.edu.sa/en/news/kaust-researchers-earn-dual-bell-finalist-selections
(July 2024) CEMSE division at KAUST highlighted our nomination for the Gordon Bell Prize (Climate Track) 2024, https://cemse.kaust.edu.sa/news/kaust-team-selected-acm-gordon-bell-prize-climate-modelling-finalists
(July 2024) Wow! We have been selected as a Gordon Bell Prize (Climate Track) finalist for our work "Boosting Earth System Model Outputs and Saving PetaBytes in their Storage Using Exascale Climate Emulators."
(March 2024) Do not miss my talk at SIAM PP24, "GPU-Accelerated Vecchia Approximations of Gaussian Processes for Geospatial Data using Batched Matrix Computations."
(March 2024) Do not miss my talk at NVIDIA GTC24 (S61379), "Energy-Efficient GPU Computing With Mixed-Precision Modeling for Climate/Weather Applications."
(November 2023) Joshua French has invited me to give a talk at the University of Colorado Denver on Monday, November 13th, titled" Powering Spatial Statistics Analysis through High-Performance Computing with ExaGeoStat."
(October 2023) Prof. DK Panda has invited me to give a talk at the MVAPICH Group Booth at SC23 on Tuesday, Nov 14th, titled "Large-Scale Climate/Weather Statistical Modeling and Prediction with MVAPICH2."
(October 2023) I have been invited to participate as a Research/ACM SRC Posters Member at SC24!
(October 2023) I have been invited to participate as a tutorial committee Member at SC24!
(October 2023) The Journal of Spatial Statistics has accepted our paper "Which Parameterization of the Matérn Covariance Function?"
(September 2023) I have been invited to chair the "Extreme-Scale Applications" session on Tuesday, Nov 14, at SC23 (https://sc23.conference-program.com/session/?sess=sess177)!
(September 2023) Our Paper, "The Third Competition on Spatial Statistics for Large Datasets," has been accepted in The Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics (JABES) (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13253-023-00584-9).
(July 2023) Our Paper "Reducing Data Motion and Energy Consumption of Geospatial Modeling Applications Using \\Automated Precision Conversion" has been accepted at the IEEE Cluster Conference, 2023.
(May 2023) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13253-023-00584-9
(April 2023) I have been invited to participate in HiPC23 as a program committee member (System Software)!
(April 2023) I have been invited to participate in HPCAsia2024 as a program committee member (Applications and Algorithms track)!
(March 2023) Do not miss my talk at NVIDIA GTC23 (S51747), "Non-Gaussian Modeling and Prediction on Modern GPUs."
(March 2023) Our second spatial statistics competition has been highlighted in KAUST Discovery Magazine (https://discovery.kaust.edu.sa/en/article/1329/a-little-competition-improves-statistics).
(February 2023) Do not miss my talk at SIAM CSE23, "Tile-centric Approximation for Weather and Climate Applications".
(December 2022) I have been invited to participate in ISC'23 as a program committee member (Algorithms and Applications track)!
(November 2022) I have been invited to participate in SC'23 as a program committee member (Machine Learning and HPC Track)!
(November 2022) I have been invited to participate in SC'23 as a technical committee member (Tutorial track)!
(November 2022) Our session "Fighting for Performance: Spatial Statistics Computing on Manycore Systems" has been accepted at JSM23 as an invited session!
(October 2022) "Large-Scale Geostatistical Data Science with ExaGeoStat" at the International Conference on Mathematics, Computational Sciences and Statistics 2022 (ICoMCos), Mathematics Department, Faculty of Science Technology, Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia.
(September 2022) Our Paper, "Large-scale Environmental Data Science with ExaGeoStatR," has been accepted in the Environmetrics journal (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1099095X).
(August 2022) Our SC22 BoF has been accepted, titled "AI is not! Ethical Concerns of Coupling AI with HPC" with Jesmin Jahan (Intel), Tony Hey (STFC), and David Keyes (KAUST) -- https://cemse.kaust.edu.sa/ecrc/events/event/hpc-neutral-ai-not-ethical-concerns-coupling-ai-hpc-bof-sc22.
(August 2022) Our work has been highlighted by KAUST discovery in a new article, "Trio of tuning tools for modeling large spatial datasets," https://discovery.kaust.edu.sa/en/article/1262/a-model-for-millions-of-locations
(July 2022) We have been selected as one of the six ACM GB finalists this year! (https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/08/12/sc22-unveils-acm-gordon-bell-prize-finalists/) .
(June 2022) I have been invited to participate in HiPC`22 as a program committee member (System Software Tack)!
(May 2022) I have been invited to participate in IEEE Cluster`22 as a program committee member (Programming and System Software Tack)!
(May 2022) Our work has been highlighted by HPCwire in a new article, "What’s New in HPC Research: Air Pollution Prediction, nOS-V, cuHARM, Quantum Ray Tracing & More" https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/05/19/whats-new-in-hpc-research-air-pollution-prediction-nos-v-cuharm-quantum-ray-tracing-more.
(April 2022) I have been invited to participate in the ISC`22 conference as a session chair.
(April 2022) I have been invited to participate in the JDS special issue on “Large-Scale Spatial Data Science” as a guest editor.
(April 2022) Our Paper, "Parallel Space-Time Likelihood Optimization for Air Pollution Prediction on Large-Scale Systems," has been accepted in PASC`22 (Climate, Weather and Earth Sciences Track).
(April 2022) "Large-scale spatial statistics" at the International Statistical Institute (ISI`22) (online), 25 April 2022, Registration: https://www.isi-web.org/courses/node-1270.
(March 2022) I have been invited to participate in HiPC`22 as a program committee member (HPC System Software Track)!
(December 2021) Our Paper "Parallel Approximations of the Tukey g-and-h Likelihoods and Predictions for Non-Gaussian Geostatistics" has been accepted in IPDPS22 (Applications Track).
(December 2021) I have been invited to participate in ISC'22 as a program committee member (HPC algorithms and applications)!
(November 2021) I have been invited to participate in SC'22 as a program committee member (Machine Learning and HPC Track)!
(November 2021) I won 2nd place for the best talk at the "KAUST Research Open Week (KROW)," Nov. 2021, https://researchopenweek.kaust.edu.sa/home!
(November 2021) Our talk "Large-scale Geospatial Data Science using ExaGeoStat" at the "KAUST Research Open Week (KROW)" Nov. 2021, https://researchopenweek.kaust.edu.sa/home (10:20 am AST time on Nov. 29th, 2021)
(October 2021) We have been invited to give a talk at the "KAUST Research Open Week (KROW)" Nov. 2021, https://researchopenweek.kaust.edu.sa/home
(September 2021) I have been invited to participate in IPDPS'22 as a program committee member (Algorithm Track)!
(August 2021) Our work has been highlighted by KAUST discovery in a new article, "Trio of tuning tools for modeling large spatial datasets," https://discovery.kaust.edu.sa/en/article/1151/trio-of-tuning-tools-for-modeling-large-spatial-datasets.
(July 2021) Our work has been highlighted by HPCwire in a new article, "KAUST Leverages Mixed Precision for Geospatial Data," https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/07/28/kaust-leverages-mixed-precision-for-geospatial-data.
(July 2021) Our work has been highlighted by KAUST discovery in a new article, "Mixing precision for model acceleration," https://discovery.kaust.edu.sa/en/article/1155/mixing-precision-for-model-acceleration.
(July 2021) A new Article in KAUST discovery, "Mixing precision for model acceleration," https://discovery.kaust.edu.sa/en/article/1155/mixing-precision-for-model-acceleration.
(July 2021) Our Paper "Competition on spatial statistics for large datasets" has been accepted in the Journal of Agriculture, Biological and Environmental Statistics (CSDA).
(June 2021) We received the "best talk award" at the "Intelligent illumination of the Earth" KAUST 2021 workshop for the talk "ExaGeoStat: Exploiting Data Sparsity/Mixed-Precision in Earth System Models."
(June 2021) We have been invited to give a talk at the "Intelligent illumination of the Earth" KAUST 2021 workshop.
(May 2021) I have been invited to participate in HiPC'21 as a program committee member (HPC System Software Track)!
(May 2021) Our Paper "Accelerating Geostatistical Modeling and Prediction With Mixed-Precision Computations: A High-Productivity Approach with PaRSEC" was accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) special section on Innovative R&D toward the Exascale Era in collaboration with ICL/UTK Team.
(May 2021) Our Paper "Efficiency assessment of approximated spatial predictions for large datasets" has been accepted in the Spatial Statistics Journal (SJJ)-- https://www.journals.elsevier.com/spatial-statistics.
(April 2021) Our Poster "Large-scale Tukey g-and-h (TGH) Non-Gaussian Spatial Modeling on Manycore Systems" has been accepted to be presented in ISC High-Performance June 2021.
(April 2021) Our paper "High-Performance Multivariate Geospatial Statistics on Manycore Systems" has been accepted in IEEE Transactions of Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9397281).
(April 2021) Our International Statistical Institute (ISI) short course on "Large-scale Spatial Data Science" is now open for registration. The short course will take place online on May 6th, with M. Genton and H. Huang. (https://www.isi-web.org/events/courses/short-2021/large-scale-spatial-data-science).
(March 2021) Our @NVIDIAGTC talk "Mixed-precision machine learning method for environmental applications on GPUs" is highlighted as one of NVIDIA's Top 5 HPC technical sessions. (https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gtc-21-top-5-high-performance-computing-technical-sessions) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X49lEmZmyk).
(March 2021) I am giving a talk at SIAM CSE21, "ExaGeoStat: Moving Towards Large-Scale Geostatistical Modeling on Manycore Systems" (https://meetings.siam.org/sess/dsp_talk.cfm?p=109036).
(March 2021) Prof. Marc Genton and I are organizing a mini-symposium at the SIAM CSE21 on March 1st. More information can be found on (https://cutt.ly/Bzi8fbc).
(February 2021) I am giving a talk at SIAM PP`22, "Accelerating Space and Space-Time Statistical Modeling with Mixed-Precision Arithmetic" (https://meetings.siam.org/sess/dsp_talk.cfm?p=117760).
(February 2021) I have been invited to participate in the SIAM CSE21 posters reviewing committee.
(February 2021) We received an invitation to give a short course at the 63rd ISI World Statistics Congress, 11-16 July 2021, about "Large-Scale Spatial Data Science." (https://www.isi2021.org/)
(January 2021) We received an invitation to give an IAMG2022 short course about "Large-Scale Spatial Data Science" from 29 August - 3 September 2022 (https://www.iamgconferences.org/iamg2022/).
(January 2021) Our proposed panel, "High-Performance Statistical Computing: Current Trends and Future Prospects," is accepted at the Joint Statistical Meeting (JSM`22), August 2022 (https://ww2.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2022).
(January 2021) Our proposed topic-contributed session, "Geostatistical Computing on Modern Parallel Architectures," session has been accepted at the Joint Statistical Meeting (JSM`22), August 2022 (https://ww2.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2022).
(January 2021) Our "Climate/Weather Modeling and Prediction using Mixed-Precision on Tensor Core Hardware" talk has been accepted at the NVIDIA GTC22 AI conference in March 2022 (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/gtc).
(January 2021) We received an invitation to give a talk at an NVIDIA GTC21 AI conference in April 2021, "Mixed-Precision Machine Learning Method for Environmental Applications on GPUs." (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/gtc)
(November 2020) I have been invited to participate in the IEEE/ACM International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage (SC21) as a program committee member!
(November 2020) Join our AI competition As part of the 7th KAUST-NVIDIA Workshop on Accelerating Scientific Applications using GPUs! More here.
(November 2020) Join our spatial statistics competition on a large scale! More here.
(October 2020) KAUST CEMSE graduate seminar on ExaGeoStat (https://cemse.kaust.edu.sa/events/event/exageostat-moving-towards-large-scale-geostatistical-modeling-manycore-systems). On Zoom (https://kaust.zoom.us/j/95474758108?pwd=WkwrdiszTE1uYTdmR3JRK09LVDErZz09). Oct. 8th, 2020 -- 5:00 - 6:00 AM (EST time).
(September 2020) A new release of ExaGeoStatR v1.0.1 is up! (https://github.com/ecrc/exageostatR).
(June 2020) The ExaGeoStat v1.1.0 package has been released! (https://github.com/ecrc/exageostat).
(April 2020) A new Article about ExaGeoStat in NVIDIA Blogs, (https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/04/14/kaust-environmental-models-mixed-precision/)
(February 2020) A new Article about ExaGeoStatR in KAUST discovery (https://discovery.kaust.edu.sa/en/article/949/pop-stats-for-big-geodata).
(December 2019) I have served as a session chair at IEEE HiPC'19 international conference.
(December 2019) We received an invitation to give a talk at an NVIDIA GTC20 AI conference at San Jose McEnery Convention Center, Silicon Valley, San Jose, CA, US, March 2020, "A Mixed-Precision Machine Learning Approach to Accelerate Geostatistical Simulations and Prediction on GPUs." (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/gtc)
(December 2019) "ExaGeoStatR: Harnessing HPC Capabilities for Large Scale Geospatial Modeling Using R," the SC19 poster has been highlighted in the HPCwire article.
(September 2019) Our poster "ExaGeoStatR: Harnessing HPC Capabilities for Large scale Geospatial statistics" is officially accepted at the SC19 international conference, Denver, CO!
(September 2019) I have been selected to participate in the SC19 international conference Early Career Program (ECP) in Denver, CO.
(August 2019) Our paper "Geostatistical Modeling and Prediction Using Mixed-Precision Tile Cholesky Factorization" is officially accepted at IEEE HiPC 2019 international conference, Hyderabad, India!
(March 2019) I have been invited to participate in IEEE HiPC'19 international conference as a program committee member!
(March 2019) I have been promoted to a research scientist at the Extreme Computing Research Center (ECRC), KAUST.
(August 2018) We received an invitation for a talk at the Intel Performance Users Group (IXPUG) annual Fall conference, Intel Corporation, Oregon, US, Sep. 2018, "Machine Learning Framework for Large-Scale Weather and Climate Prediction using Exact and Approximate Linear Algebra Computation." (https://www.ixpug.org/events/ixpug-fallconf-2018).
(July 2018) Our paper "Parallel Approximation of the Maximum Likelihood Estimation for the Prediction of Large-Scale Geostatistics Simulations" is officially accepted in IEEE CLUSTER international conference, 2018, Belfast, UK!
(June 2018) Our paper "A high performance unified software for geostatistics on manycore systems" is officially accepted in TPDS!
(April 2018) We received an invitation for a poster at HPC Asia @ ISC’18 (Hierarchical Computations on Manycore Architectures). (https://2018.isc-program.com/?page_id=10&id=int_spe128&sess=sess148)
(April 2018) I have been invited to participate in HiPC'18 as a program committee member!
(Oct 29, 2017) A new article about ExaGeoStat on KAUST Discovery magazine, "Cutting datasets down to size, A powerful statistical tool could significantly reduce the burden of analyzing very large datasets" https://discovery.kaust.edu.sa/en/article/431/cutting-datasets-down-to-size
See Talks, Publications, Short Courses, and Popular Publicity for detailed records.
High-performance statistical computing: Connecting statistical methods with modern parallel and heterogeneous computing platforms through the HPSC initiative.
Extreme-scale spatial data science: Scalable Gaussian-process modeling, low-rank and Vecchia approximations, non-Gaussian statistics, and uncertainty quantification.
Sustainable computing: Mixed-precision linear algebra, GPU acceleration, communication-efficient algorithms, and reduced energy-to-solution.
Climate and environmental modeling: Exascale emulators that reduce computational and storage requirements for Earth-system outputs.
Federated spatial intelligence: Decentralized inference and asynchronous modeling of distributed geospatial data, including FedAir-KSA.
Research mentorship: Co-advising Ph.D. students and mentoring postdoctoral researchers, research staff, and interns in HPC, statistics, and AI.
My long-term research direction is to build reliable and sustainable AI–HPC frameworks for scientific discovery, including uncertainty-aware Earth-system prediction and learning from distributed environmental data.
January 2025–present: Senior Research Scientist, Applied Mathematics and Computational Science, KAUST.
June 2021–December 2024: Research Scientist IV, KAUST.
March 2019–June 2021: Research Scientist III, KAUST.
September 2016–February 2019: Postdoctoral Fellow, KAUST. Developed ExaGeoStat, tile low-rank support, and the ExaGeoStatR interface.
March 2012–May 2016: Research and Teaching Assistant, The Ohio State University. Worked on parallel data mining, bitmap indexing, spatial joins, elastic MPI applications, and fault tolerance.
May–August 2015: Ph.D. Intern, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Developed fault-tolerant support for parallel support vector machines.
March 2006–February 2012: Research and Teaching Assistant, Menoufia University, Egypt. Worked on FPGA-based elliptic-curve cryptography and taught computer science courses.
FedAir-KSA (2026–2027): Co-Principal Investigator, funded by the KAUST Small Translational Research Grant program. GPU-accelerated decentralized air-pollution mapping from low-cost sensors.
Data-driven wind energy forecasting (2023): Co-Principal Investigator, SDAIA–KAUST AI Program. Large-scale task-based second-order optimization for deep neural networks.
Competitive supercomputing allocations: Served as technical proposer, principal user, or co-investigator on Frontier, Summit, Fugaku, Shaheen-II/III, and HAWK for geostatistics, climate emulation, mixed-precision computing, and scalable AI.
ExaGeoStatCPP: C++ API for exascale geostatistics on manycore systems.
ExaGeoStat: Unified software for large-scale geostatistical modeling and prediction.
ExaGeoStatR: R interface to the ExaGeoStat ecosystem.
MPCR: Multi- and mixed-precision computing in R.
ParallelVecchiaGP: Parallel Vecchia approximations for Gaussian processes on GPUs.
RCOMPSs: Scalable execution of R code on manycore systems.
TLAR: Tile-based linear algebra in R with mixed-precision tiles and CPU/GPU support.
MaTEx: Machine Learning Toolkit for Extreme Scale.
2026: Fully decentralized inference for spatial data using low-rank models. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B. Article.
2026: Scaled block Vecchia approximation for high-dimensional Gaussian process emulation on GPUs. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. Preprint.
2025: High-performance statistical computing (HPSC): Challenges, opportunities, and future directions. WIREs Computational Statistics.
2025: Block Vecchia approximation for scalable and efficient Gaussian process computations. Technometrics, 67(3), 546–558.
2025: Efficient large-scale nonstationary spatial covariance function estimation using convolutional neural networks. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics.
2024: Boosting Earth System Model Outputs and Saving Petabytes in Their Storage Using Exascale Climate Emulators. SC24; 2024 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling.
2022: Reshaping geostatistical modeling and prediction for extreme-scale environmental applications. SC22; ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalist.
2018: ExaGeoStat: A high performance, unified software for geostatistics on manycore systems. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.
See the Publications page and Google Scholar profile for full citations and additional work.
2026: Scalable asynchronous federated modeling for spatial data. KAUST Research Conference on Mathematical and Data Sciences.
2025: Scalable execution framework for R on manycore systems. SC25 Poster Session, Saint Louis, USA.
2019: ExaGeoStatR: Harnessing HPC capabilities for large-scale geospatial modeling using R. SC19, Denver, USA.
2026–present: Elected Member, International Statistical Institute (ISI).
2026–present: Senior Member, IEEE.
2024: ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling, winning team.
2022: ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalist.
2021: Talk recognition at KAUST Research Open Week and the Intelligent Illumination of the Earth Workshop.
2012: Full scholarship for Ph.D. studies at The Ohio State University.
Ph.D., Computer Science and Engineering: The Ohio State University, May 2016.
M.S., Computer Science and Engineering: The Ohio State University, March 2014.
M.Sc., Computer Science: Menoufia University, June 2009.
B.Sc., Computer Science: Menoufia University, September 2005.
2026: Organizing Committee Member, KAUST Rising Stars in AI Symposium, February 9–11, KAUST, Saudi Arabia.
2025: Session Chair, SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE25), March 3–7, Fort Worth, Texas, USA.
2020: Reviewer, International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS).
2017: Program Committee Member, 4th International Workshop on High Performance Computing for Big Data (HPC4BD).
Scientific leadership: Co-Founder and Scientific Lead, High-Performance Statistical Computing (HPSC) initiative.
Conference organization: SC25 Student Cluster Competition; SIAM PP26 minisymposia on matrix computations and scalable statistical methods; SIAM CSE25 minisymposium on matrix computations.
2027 program committee: 41st ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS 2027).
2027 paper committee invitation: Machine Learning and AI track, Supercomputing Asia (SCA 2027).
SC26 service: Algorithms Conflict Chair; Algorithms Committee Member; Research Posters Member; HPC4EES Workshop Organizer, Session Chair, and Committee Member; WACCPD Workshop Committee Member. Official SC26 profile — King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia.
2026 session chair: Technical Papers program, SC26, Chicago, USA.
2026 program committees: ICPP (Algorithms), ICS, WSDM (Demo), HPCAsia (Machine Learning), ISC (Machine Learning & AI), IPDPS (Machine Learning), and SC (Posters/Algorithms).
2025 program committees: SCI (Programming Environment), WACCPD, GrAPL, ISC (Machine Learning & AI), IPDPS (Machine Learning), and HiPC.
Earlier service: Program committees, reviewing, and session organization at SC, ISC, IPDPS, HiPC, IEEE Cluster, SIAM, and related HPC and statistics venues.
Recent reviewing includes Technometrics, Environmetrics, and Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics (2026); The Journal of Supercomputing and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (2025); and Proceedings of the Royal Society A (2024). Earlier service includes Computers & Geosciences and Parallel Computing.
September 11, 2026: High-Performance Statistical Computing Community Hub: Online Seminar Series — IASC–ISI · Community announcement.
April 2026: High-Performance Statistical Computing: Why the Future of Statistics Is Parallel — ASA StatTrak.
March 8, 2026: Highlighting Scalable Statistical Innovations at SIAM PP26 — KAUST Bayesian Computational Statistics and Modeling.
December 26, 2024: An interview with NSF NCAR’s Dr. Allison H. Baker, a member of the winning team for the 2024 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling — NSF NCAR / CISL.
December 20, 2024: “Alps” Powers a Prize-Winning Ultra-High Resolution Global Climate Emulator — Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS).
Browse Popular Publicity for the full collection of news, interviews, outreach, and Arabic and translated coverage.
Last updated: November 2026.