Al Geist is a Corporate Research Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where he leads the 35 member Computer Science Research Group.
He is one of the original developers of PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine), which became a world-wide de facto standard for heterogeneous distributed computing.
Al was actively involved in both the MPI-1 and MPI-2 design teams and more recently the development of FT-MPI, a fault tolerant MPI implementation.

Today He leads a national Scalable Systems Software effort, involving all the DOE and NSF supercomputer sites, with the goal of defining standardized interfaces between system software components. Al is co-PI of a national Genomes to Life (GTL) center. The goal of his GTL center is to develop new algorithms, and computational infrastructure for understanding protein machines and regulatory pathways in cells. He heads up a project developing self-adapting, fault tolerant algorithms for 100,000 processor systems.

In his 20 years at ORNL, he has published two books and over 190 papers in areas ranging from heterogeneous distributed computing, numerical linear algebra, parallel computing, collaboration technologies, solar energy, materials science, biology, and solid state physics.