Lori Diachin is the Project Director for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP). ECP is a collaborative Department of Energy effort supported by both the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Office of Science to accelerate the delivery of a capable exascale computing ecosystem for breakthroughs in scientific discovery, energy assurance, economic competitiveness, and national security (https://www.exascaleproject.org/). In her role as Project Director, Lori sets the strategic direction for ECP and ensures that the project has an impactful and executable plan that delivers on its goals and objectives.

Lori is also the Principal Deputy of the Computing organization at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Computing Principal Directorate has approximately 1,400 staff serving the needs of the Laboratory in areas ranging from high performance computing, computing sciences for the missions of LLNL, and information technology for business and workforce enablement. Lori serves as a senior-level advisor to the Computing Principal Associate Director and to division leaders and institute directors on strategies to develop and sustain critical computer and computational capabilities.

She previously served as the program director for the HPC4Manufacturing and HPC4Materials programs in the DOE EERE and FE program offices. She was involved with DOE’s SciDAC program from 2001-2018, most recently serving as the FASTMath Institute Director; leading a team of over 50 researchers from 10 different organizations. She was director of the Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) for 6 years and the Acting Information Technology Department head at LLNL for two years. CASC houses approximately 125 applied mathematicians, computer scientists, and data scientists who conduct world class, collaborative scientific research and development on problems critical to national security. The Center’s core competencies include high performance computing, computational physics, numerical mathematics, computer science, and data science.

Lori has over 30 years experience in applied mathematics research where her areas of expertise include mesh quality improvement, mesh component software, numerical methods, and parallel computing. She is the co-author of over 50 technical journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceeding articles in these areas. Before joining LLNL, Lori was a computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. Lori received her Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from University of Virginia. She joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2003.