Barney Maccabe

Arthur B. (Barney) Maccabe is a professor and the associate dean of research in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona. He previously served as executive director of the Institute for Computation and Data-Enabled Insight (ICDI) at the University of Arizona from March 2022 to June 2025.  From 2009 to 2022, Dr. Maccabe was the director of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where he oversaw research in high-performance computing, applied mathematics and computational sciences. Prior to his tenure at ORNL, he spent over 25 years at the University of New Mexico (UNM) as a professor of computer science, graduating 11 PhD students and nine MS students. During his time at UNM, he also served as director of the Center for High Performance Computing and as interim chief information officer for the university.

 

Professor Maccabe’s research focuses on system software for massively parallel systems. Working closely with Sandia National Laboratories, he was a lead architect of a series of lightweight operating systems for large-scale computing platforms.  Puma, one of these operating systems, powered ASCI Red, the first teraflop system and the #1 ranked machine on the Top500 list from June 1997 to June 2000. Catamount, a later version, ran on the Sandia/Cray Red Storm system, which achieved a #2 Top500 ranking in November 2006. A key component of this work, the Portals networking programming API, directly inspired aspects of the recently announced Ultra Ethernet standard.

 

Beyond operating systems, Dr. Maccabe has led sponsored research in many areas including compiler technology, network intrusion detection, lightweight file and I/O systems, system software for sensor networks and virtualization for high-end computing systems. His current research addresses the policies, mechanisms and tools needed to manage large-scale data for training advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models used in scientific discovery.

 

Dr. Maccabe currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Alliance for Data Science and AI (ADSA), the External Review Board for Sandia National Laboratories’ Computing and Information Sciences Foundation and the Steering Committee for the ACM International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC).