Rate My Professor Alistair Rendell

Professor Alistair Rendell is an Emeritus Professor in the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University. He served as Vice President and Executive Dean for the College from January 2019 until December 2025. Prior to joining Flinders University in 2019, Rendell had a 23-year career at the Australian National University, including more than five years as Director of the Research School of Computer Science. In the early 1990s, he held a postdoctoral position at the NASA Ames Research Centre working on vector supercomputers.

Rendell studied chemistry as an undergraduate and completed a PhD in theoretical chemistry. His research specializations include computational chemistry, focusing on solving the Schrödinger equation for atoms and molecules, and the development of computational chemistry software packages such as GAMESS. He has collaborated with companies including IBM, Microsoft, Fujitsu, and Intel on projects involving high-performance computing and a US-led initiative for software on exascale computing platforms. Key publications include "The General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System (GAMESS): Novel Methods on Novel Architectures" (2023, Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation), "Toward an Extreme-Scale Electronic Structure System" (2023, Journal of Chemical Physics), "Scaling Correlated Fragment Molecular Orbital Calculations on Summit" (2023), "Faster Self-Consistent Field (SCF) Calculations on GPU Clusters" (2021, Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation), "Enabling Large-Scale Correlated Electronic Structure Calculations: Scaling the RI-MP2 Method on Summit" (2021), and "High-Performance, Graphics Processing Unit-Accelerated Fock Build Algorithm" (2020). Rendell's 157 publications have received over 28,000 citations, demonstrating substantial influence in high-performance computing for quantum chemistry applications in drug discovery, materials science, and catalysis. His work contributes to UN Sustainable Development Goals 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) and 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production).