SDSC Mourns the Loss of Dr. Robert P. Harkness

Robert P. Harkness, a computational astrophysicist with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, died on Sunday, January 27, after a brief bout with cancer. He was 56. Harkness joined SDSC in 2001 as a member of SDSC's Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics. With a total of more than 30 years' experience in computational science and high-performance computing, he focused much of his research on the dynamics of exploding stars (novae and supernovae), but also specialized in writing new applications that allowed researchers worldwide to perform ever-larger computer simulations. A native of the United Kingdom, Harkness received his D. Phil at Oxford University in 1981. As a computational astrophysicist, Harkness was at the forefront of new programming models and algorithms, while sharing his extensive experiences. At SDSC, Harkness was a leading developer of the Enzo code, an advanced, 3-D time-dependent code for computational astrophysics capable of simulating the evolution of the universe from the beginning using first principles, one of the most efficient high-performance codes in the astronomy community.