Frédéric Desprez

Director of the Inria centre at Grenoble Alpes University
Frédéric Desprez
© Inria / Photo C. Morel

Frédéric Desprez takes up his position as Director of the centre Inria at the University Grenoble Alpes on October 1, 2020. Appointed by Bruno Sportisse, CEO of Inria, he succeeds Patrick Gros, who headed the center from December 2014 to September 2020.

Doctor in computer science from the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble in 1994 after a thesis spent at the Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon around parallel linear algebra problems and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Frédéric Desprez began his career as Associate Professor at ENSEIRB (Bordeaux) before joining Inria as a researcher in the ReMaP team at ENS Lyon (under the supervision of Yves Robert). In 2001, he obtained his authorization to supervise research at the Claude Bernard University of Lyon 1.

In 2002, he became director of research at Inria and created the GRAAL team. Between 2001 and 2006, he was deputy director of the LIP laboratory at ENS Lyon, France, and between 2006 and January 2009 director of LIP. In 2010, he co-founded the startup SysFera where he held a position of scientific advisor. Since 2012, he has been deputy to the scientific director in charge of high performance computing, distributed systems, networks and software engineering.

Frederic Desprez's research activities include parallel algorithms, resource management for large-scale distributed platforms, cloud computing, and large-scale experimental infrastructures. He leads the Grid'5000 project (and co-leads its SILECS / SLICES monitoring), which offers a French and European infrastructure for experimental research on various aspects of distributed computing and networks, from small objects connected to large data centers of tomorrow.