Franck Cappello received his Ph.D. in Computer Architecture from the University of Paris XI in 1994. He joined the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), where he contributed to cluster and Grid computing, including desktop Grid and later hybrid parallel programming (MPI+OpenMP). In 2003, he moved to INRIA and led the R&D phase of Grid’5000 until 2008. Grid’5000 is a large-scale experimental platform for parallel and distributed computing research, which remains active and has produced over 2,500 scientific publications and supported hundreds of researchers and Ph.D. students. In 2009, as a visiting research professor at the University of Illinois, Cappello, alongside Prof. Marc Snir, established the Joint Laboratory on Petascale Computing (now the Joint Laboratory on Extreme Scale Computing). This collaboration is one of the largest and longest-lasting in high-performance computing, supporting numerous researchers and students in scientific computing, high-performance, and artificial intelligence. From 2009 to 2013, Cappello led an extensive research effort in parallel computing resilience, covering many aspects: failure characterization, checkpointing, fault tolerance protocols, silent data corruption detection, and failure prediction.

As a member of the International Exascale Software Project, he led the roadmap efforts related to resilience at Exascale scales. In 2016, Cappello became the director of two Exascale Computing Project (ECP) software projects: VeloC, for high-performance checkpointing of exascale applications, and SZ, for lossy compression of scientific data. Both software are now deployed in Exascale systems. He has become a leading figure in lossy compression for scientific data by leading the SZ project and developing key methodologies with the Z-checker compression error assessment tool and the SDRBench repository of reference scientific datasets.

Throughout his career, Cappello has made significant contributions to parallel and distributed computing, high-performance computing resilience, and scientific data compression. He is an IEEE Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2024 IEEE Charles Babbage Award, the 2024 Euro-Par Achievement Award, the 2022 ACM HPDC Achievement Award, two R&D 100 awards (2019 and 2021), the 2018 IEEE TCPP Outstanding Service Award, and the 2021 IEEE Transactions of Computer Award for Editorial Service and Excellence.