Richard P. Kendall

Dr. Richard P. Kendall is a software engineering consultant with the DoD High Performance Computer Modernization Program (HPCMP). He has more than 50 years of experience in applications of computational mathematics to engineering problems. After graduating from Rice University in 1972, he joined Esso Production Research Co. (now Exxon Mobil) as a Senior Research Mathematician. There he was directly involved in the development of physics-based reservoir simulators, the enablers of early virtual prototypes of petroleum reservoirs. During the early 1980s, he helped start an ISV to develop high-performance software modeling tools for the international oil market, specifically state-owned companies that lacked the expertise of oil industry leaders such as ExxonMobil. This startup was eventually sold to Western Atlas International (now Schlumberger), where Dr. Kendall became the Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Western Atlas Software Division. In the mid-1990s, he joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as a team leader for Oil & Gas Programs. In 1996, he was appointed Director of the Computational Testbed for Industry. This DOE User Facility provided U.S. companies such as Procter & Gamble access to state-of-the art supercomputers of the 1990s (for example, the Thinking Machines CM-5). Later at Los Alamos, he was appointed Chief Information Officer of the Laboratory. In 2007, he followed Dr. Douglass Post to the HPCMP CREATE program, where he still consults. He is a member of IEEE and SPE/AIME and has published in the fields of numerical analysis, petroleum engineering, information technology, and software engineering.