The untold story: How Bill Buzbee got to NCAR

In which the future SCD director quits physics, builds nukes, and goes to Sweden . . .

Bill Buzbee, 1973 Contents Search Article index Back issues Subscribe Contact us SCD

by Bill Buzbee as told to Lynda Lester I got started in supercomputing by accident, I suppose -- or good luck. I grew up on a little farm in central Texas, and in the mid-40s, my dad went to work for an independent oil producer. This oil producer had a nephew, Bob Gregory, who was at the University of Illinois studying computational mathematics. In the meantime, I finished high school, went off to the military, and eventually wound up at the University of Texas in Austin studying physics. Bob Gregory came to the math department in 1960 from the University of California at Santa Barbara. So since he was the nephew of my dad's employer, I had to go over and get acquainted with him. He'd been part of the ILLIAC I project up at the University of Illinois -- and of course, computers in those days were very exotic and novel, and I was curious about them. Bob got me interested in computing. But we didn't have computer science back then -- computing was always in the math department. So I switched degree paths, left physics, and went into mathematics. I got a master's degree in numerical analysis under this fellow, Dr. Bob Gregory. Then during my graduate work at the University of Texas, one of my classmates, Thurman Frank, was involved in the Los Alamos Advanced Study Program. He and I did a lot of homework together, and he talked me into interviewing at Los Alamos. They made me by far the best offer of any I received. So in the summer of '62 I got married, packed up a U-haul trailer, and the bride and I went off to Los Alamos -- where we spent about 25 years. Initially I worked on simulation of nuclear weapons. Then in 1968, the lab created a Computing Division. (Again, early in the lab's history, computing had been just a part of another division.) So I joined that division and got involved in some fascinating research on solving elliptic problems -- which led eventually to a paper that became a citation classic. Following that, I did a sabbatical in Sweden, then returned to the lab and went into management. In 1974 I headed a computer applications group -- it was actually a "programmer for hire" group, just within the lab. It prospered nicely, and by 1979, I was invited to be assistant director of the Computing Division, which I did, overseeing research in parallel computing. In 1984, I was invited to be deputy director of the Computing Division, which I did. Then in late 1986, when I heard about an opening at NCAR, I applied for it. I was offered the job, and came here in April '87. So that's the path by which I got to NCAR! Back to "A toast and a roast for Bill Buzbee"

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