NJIT's Bader, Who Helped Invent Modern Supercomputing, Gets HoF Honor

Written by: Evan Koblentz
Published: Monday, March 17, 2025
NJIT's Wulver supercomputer, like most of its type, has familiar hardware and the Linux operating system
NJIT's Wulver supercomputer, like most of its type, has familiar hardware and the Linux operating system

New Jersey Institute of Technology distinguished professor David Bader was inducted recently into the Mimms Museum of Technology and Art Hall of Fame, located near Atlanta.

The museum committee cited Bader, who also serves as director of NJIT’s Institute for Data Science, for “revolutioniz[ing] the computing industry through groundbreaking innovations that democratized high-performance computing.” His late-1990s supercomputer design combined off-the-shelf CPUs, high-performance networking, and the open-source Linux operating system.

Until that time, supercomputers ran on proprietary hardware and commercially licensed software, making them inaccessible to all but massive corporations, government agencies and the largest universities. Computer scientists who advocated for high-performance computing through off-the-shelf hardware and Linux software were widely viewed as unrealistic optimists.

Following innovations such as Bader’s, supercomputer designers began adopting these designs. Today, essentially all of the world’s highest-performing supercomputers run Linux. Many also use common processors, although those are gradually being replaced by high-end GPUs.

"When I built the Linux supercomputer in 1998, many believed proprietary systems were the only path forward for high-performance computing,” said Bader. “It demonstrated that commodity hardware with the Linux operating system could deliver supercomputing performance at a fraction of the cost. What began as my passion for building commodity off-the-shelf systems ultimately transformed the supercomputing landscape — today, every machine on the Top500 list is based on this design.”

“The greatest satisfaction comes from seeing how this democratization has accelerated scientific discovery across disciplines, from astrophysics to climate science to genomics, by putting powerful computational tools in the hands of researchers worldwide."

Bader also taught and performed research at Georgia Institute of Technology from 2005-2019, where he founded and chaired the School of Computational Science and Engineering.

Bader in 2023 had his early supercomputer research recognized by the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California. Read his thoughts on such research and its impact on modern artificial intelligence.