David Keyes

Adjunct Professor

(off-campus) KAUST

Research Interests

Applied and computational mathematics for PDEs, computational science, parallel numerical algorithms, parallel performance analysis, PDE-constrained optimization

David Keyes is a professor of Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and Mechanical Engineering at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), where he was a founding Dean in 2009 and founding Director of the Extreme Computing Research Center in 2012. He is also an adjunct professor of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics at Columbia University, where he formerly held the Fu Foundation Chair.  

Keyes focuses on scalable solvers that exploit hierarchy and data sparsity, targeting power-austere emerging architectures. He collaborates on large-scale applications in energy and environment that demand high performance because of resolution, dimension, high fidelity physical models, or the “multi-solve” requirements of optimization, control, sensitivity analysis, inverse problems, data assimilation, or uncertainty quantification.  To support such missions, he co-created and popularized the Newton-Krylov-Schwarz (NKS, 1994), pseudo-transient continuation (ψTC, 1998), Additive Schwarz Preconditioned Inexact Newton (ASPIN, 2002) methods, the Hierarchical Computations on Manycore Architectures (HiCMA, 2014) dense solver framework, and a multilevel version of the H2 hierarchical matrix solver (H2MG, 2024). 

Before joining KAUST, Keyes led multi-institutional scalable solver software projects in the SciDAC and ASCI programs of the US Department of Energy (DoE), ran university collaboration programs at US DoE and NASA institutes, and taught at Columbia, Old Dominion, and Yale Universities. He is a Fellow of SIAM, the AMS, and the AAAS. He shared Gordon Bell Prizes from the ACM in 1999 and in 2024 and was awarded the Sidney Fernbach Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 2007, the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession in 2011, and the IEEE TCPP Outstanding Service and Contributions Award in 2025. On its 35th anniversary, HPCWire named Keyes one of 35 “legends” of High Performance Computing (https://www.hpcwire.com/35-hpc-legends-david-keyes/). He earned a B.S.E. in Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences from Princeton in 1978 and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard in 1984.

Education

  • ​​​​Ph.D. Applied Mathematics, Harvard University, 1984
     
  • M.S. Applied Mathematics, Harvard University, 1979
     
  • B.S. Engineering, Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences, Summa Cum Laude, Princeton University, 1978
     
  • Certificate, Program in Engineering Physics, Princeton University, 1978

Selected Publications

  • ​R. Yokota, G. Turkiyyah & D. Keyes, "Communication Complexity of the Fast Multipole Method and its Algebraic Variants", Supercomput. Front. and Innov., 1:62–83, 2014.
     
  • D. Keyes et al. "Multiphysics Simulations: Challenges and Opportunities", Int. J. High Performance Computing Applications 27:5–83, 2013.
     
  • D. E. Keyes. "Exaflop/s – the Why and the How", Comptes Rendus 339:70–77, 2011.
     
  • D. A. Knoll & D. E. Keyes. "Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov Methods: A Survey of Approaches and Applications", J. Comput. Phys., 193:357–397, 2004.
     
  • X.-C. Cai & D. E. Keyes. "Nonlinear Preconditioned Inexact Newton Algorithms", SIAM J. Sci. Comp. 24:183–200, 2002.