Kyle Chard

About

Kyle Chard is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory. His research focuses on developing new systems to address various computational and data-intensive problems. Together with Ian Foster, he co-leads the Globus Labs research group, which investigates a broad range of research problems in distributed systems, data-intensive computing, learning systems, and research data management. The group emphasizes exploring theoretical concepts in systems and developing implementations that are usable by a wide range of people. Kyle Chard's active research projects include Parsl, a parallel computing framework in Python; funcX, a distributed function as a service platform; DLHub, a machine learning model publication and serving system; and Whole Tale, a multi-user platform for reproducible research. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington in March 2011 and holds a BSc. (Hons) in Computer Science as well as a BSc. in Mathematics and Computer & Electronic Systems.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Biology
• Computational biology
• Physics
• Database
• Geology
• Medicine
• Chemistry
• Geodesy
• Genetics

Selected publications

• High-Throughput Virtual Screening and Validation of a SARS-CoV-2 Main Protease Noncovalent Inhibitor

  Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · 2021 · 110 citations

  Despite the recent availability of vaccines against the acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the search for inhibitory therapeutic agents has assumed importance especially in the context of emerging new viral variants. In this paper, we describe the discovery of a novel noncovalent small-molecule inhibitor, MCULE-5948770040, that binds to and inhibits the SARS-Cov-2 main protease (M^pro) by employing a scalable high-throughput virtual screening (HTVS) framework and a…

  DOI

• The LSST DESC DC2 Simulated Sky Survey

  The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series · 2021 · 71 citations

  We describe the simulated sky survey underlying the second data challenge (DC2) carried out in preparation for analysis of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) by the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (LSST DESC). Significant connections across multiple science domains will be a hallmark of LSST; the DC2 program represents a unique modeling effort that stresses this interconnectivity in a way that has not been attempted before. This effort encompasses a full…

  DOI

• Atlas of Transcription Factor Binding Sites from ENCODE DNase Hypersensitivity Data across 27 Tissue Types

  Cell Reports · 2020 · 38 citations

  Characterizing the tissue-specific binding sites of transcription factors (TFs) is essential to reconstruct gene regulatory networks and predict functions for non-coding genetic variation. DNase-seq footprinting enables the prediction of genome-wide binding sites for hundreds of TFs simultaneously. Despite the public availability of high-quality DNase-seq data from hundreds of samples, a comprehensive, up-to-date resource for the locations of genomic footprints is lacking. Here, we develop a sca…

  DOI

• Exploring Distributed Vector Databases Performance on HPC Platforms: A Study with Qdrant

  2025-11-07 · 3 citations

  article

  Vector databases have rapidly grown in popularity, enabling efficient similarity search over data such as text, images, and video. They now play a central role in modern AI workflows, aiding large language models by grounding model outputs in external literature through retrieval-augmented generation. Despite their importance, little is known about the performance characteristics of vector databases in high-performance computing (HPC) systems that drive large-scale science. This work presents an…

  PublisherDOI

• Toward a persistent event-streaming system for high-performance computing applications

  Frontiers in High Performance Computing · 2025-09-17 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  High-performance computing (HPC) applications have traditionally relied on parallel file systems and file transfer services to manage data movement and storage. Alternative approaches have been proposed that use direct communications between application components, trading persistence and fault tolerance for speed. Event-driven architectures, as popularized in enterprise contexts, present a compelling middle ground, avoiding the performance cost and API constraints of parallel file systems while…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: SI2-SSI: Swift/E: Integrating Parallel Scripted Workflow into the Scientific Software Ecosystem

  NSF · $2.8M · 2016–2022

• CSR: Small: Cost-Aware Cloud Profiling, Prediction, and Provisioning as a Service

  NSF · $500k · 2018–2023

• CCRI: Planning: Collaborative Research: Infrastructure for Enabling Systematic Development and Research of Scientific Workflow Management Systems

  NSF · $15k · 2020–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Ian Foster

  University of Illinois Chicago

  544 shared

• Ryan Chard

  150 shared

• Yadu Babuji

  141 shared

• Ben Blaiszik

  Argonne National Laboratory

  94 shared

• Steven Tuecke

  University of Chicago

  78 shared

• Ravi Madduri

  Argonne National Laboratory

  67 shared

• Zhuozhao Li

  Southern University of Science and Technology

  60 shared

• Logan Ward

  Argonne National Laboratory

  59 shared

Labs

• Globus LabsPI

  Not provided

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  Victoria University of Wellington

  2011

Awards & honors

• IEEE TCHPC Award for Excellence for Early Career Researchers…
• Globus team R&D100 award
• New Zealand Top Achiever Doctoral Scholarship

Similar researchers at University of Chicago

• Michael Franklinh-97
• David Cashh-75