Professor Marc Snir is Michael Fainman and Saburo Muroga Professor of Computer Science and head of the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since Fall 2001. He is currently involved in the IBM PERCS project that is funded by DARPA as part of the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) initiative; and in the DOE funded Center for Programming Models for Scalable Parallel Computing.

Until August 2001 he was a senior manager at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center where he initiated and led the IBM Blue Gene project. Previously, he led the Scalable Parallel Systems research group and was responsible for major contributions to the IBM SP scalable parallel system: architecture, parallel operating environment, message-passing libraries, tools, parallel file system, parallel algorithms and applications.
Marc Snir received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1979, worked at NYU on the NYU Ultracomputer project in 1980-1982, and worked at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1982-1986, before joining IBM. Marc Snir was a major contributor to the design of the Message Passing Interface. He has published numerous papers and given many presentations on computational complexity, parallel algorithms, parallel architectures, interconnection networks, and parallel programming environments.

Marc is ACM Fellow, and IEEE Fellow. He is on the Computer Research Association Board of Directors and is on the editorial board of Parallel Processing Letters and ACM Computing Surveys.