Laura Grigori named one of HPCwire's 35 Legends
Laura Grigori © 2026 EPFL
EPFL mathematician Laura Grigori has been named to HPCwire’s HPC Legends Class of 2026, which recognizes researchers and technology leaders whose work has shaped high-performance computing.
HPCwire is a specialist publication covering high-performance computing, from supercomputers and scientific software to AI and large-scale data processing. Founded in 1987, it reports on research, technologies and people across academia, government, science and industry. Its annual HPCwire Legends list highlights researchers whose work has had a lasting impact on the field.
Among the 2026 class of HPCwire Legends is Professor Laura Grigori, a Full Professor at EPFL’s School of Basic Sciences, head of the Chair of High Performance Numerical Algorithms and Simulations and of the Laboratory of Simulation and Modelling at Paul Scherrer Institute. She is being recognized for her work on making large-scale computations more communication efficient.
Grigori develops “communication-avoiding” algorithms, which reduce the costly movement of data between processors and memory in large-scale computing. Her research focuses on the development of high-performance numerical methods for fundamental operations arising in numerical simulations, data analysis, and machine learning. Much of this work concerns numerical linear and multilinear algebra, deterministic and randomized algorithms, with the objective of addressing key challenges in high performance computing while retaining rigorous guarantees of numerical stability.
According to HPCwire, Grigori’s work helps improve scalability, reduce energy consumption, and allow larger scientific simulations and data-analysis problems to be solved more efficiently.
The HPCwire recognition follows other distinctions for Grigori’s research. She was named a SIAM Fellow in 2020 for her contributions to numerical linear algebra, including communication-avoiding algorithms. In 2024, she received the SIAM Supercomputing Career Prize for her contributions to scientific computing, particularly communication-avoiding algorithms. She is also the recipient of a European Research Council Synergy Grant.