Leading research in heterogeneous architectures, microelectronics, and intelligent software systems for scientific discovery.

Jeffrey S. Vetter, Ph.D., is a Corporate Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where he is the Head for the Advanced Computing Systems Research (ACSR) Section; ACSR has five groups with over 50 staff members working on topics including computer architectures, programming systems, software engineering, distributed computing, and microelectronics. To promote research in emerging computing technologies, in 2005, Vetter founded the Experimental Computing Laboratory (ExCL) and it annually serves about 100 scientists. Previously, Vetter was the founding group leader of the Future Technologies Group in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division from 2003 until 2020. From 2005 through 2015, Vetter was a Joint Faculty Professor at the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. At GT, from 2009 to 2015, Vetter was the Principal Investigator of the NSF Track 2D Experimental Computing XSEDE Facility, named Keeneland, for large scale heterogeneous computing using graphics processors, and the Director of the NVIDIA Center of Excellence. From 2016 until 2020, Vetter held a joint appointment at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Vetter earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He joined ORNL in 2003, after stints as a computer scientist and project leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The coherent thread through his research is developing rich architectures and software systems that solve important, real-world high-performance computing problems. In particular, he has been investigating the effectiveness of radically heterogeneous architectures, including deep memory hierarchies with non-volatile memory, and heterogeneous processors such as GPUs, SoCs, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), for important HPC and streaming applications. In fact, he helped to coin the term Extreme Heterogeneity. Most recently, he has focused on two topics: using artificial intelligence to improve softare development and improving energy-efficiency in computing by using CMOX+X architectures like analog, neuromorphic, and quantum devices.

Vetter is a Fellow of the IEEE and AAAS, and a Distinguished Scientist Member of the ACM. In 2025, Vetter was part of a large team that received the DOE Secretary of Energy Achievement Award for Leadership of the Exascale Computing Project. Later in 2025, HPCWire named Vetter one of its 35 Legends of HPC. In 2020, along with a large team from IBM and LLNL, Vetter received the SC20 Test of Time Award for the paper from SC02, entitled “An Overview of the Blue Gene/L Supercomputer.” In 2010, as part of an interdisciplinary team from Georgia Tech, NYU, and ORNL, Vetter was awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize. His papers, presentations, software, and posters have won awards at major venues. In 2015, Vetter served as the Technical Program Chair of SC15 (SC15 Breaks Exhibits and Attendance Records While in Austin). His books, entitled Contemporary High Performance Computing: From Petascale toward Exascale (Vols. 1 – 3) survey the international landscape of HPC. Vetter recently served as a member of the SRC Decadal Plan Executive Committee.

Vetter has been a PI for projects spanning the Department of Energy Office of Science (SC), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Defense, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.