Image courtesy of Gus Cunh.

Over the past few months, our esteemed colleagues at insideHPC have published a fun series of (almost) monthly profiles called "Rock Stars of HPC."

So far, they've celebrated five rock stars with well-written, in-depth profile interviews:

• Bill Kramer, National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Ricky Kendall, National Center for Computational Science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Thomas Sterling, Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University
• Marc Snir, National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• John Shalf, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Every one of them is an accomplished and respected researcher in the field of high performance computing. But is that all there is to being a rock star? And if you slice and dice the spectrum of scientific computing into different segments (grid, cloud, distributed, high throughput), who else could be considered a rock star?

If you were to ask me, I'd say that a rock star should be several of the following:

• someone who is well-known in the field; could be a controversial figure
• the kind of person with whom a graduate student would feel especially fortunate to have the opportunity to work
• someone to whom people feel moved to say some equivalent of "I love your work"
• someone who relatively recently published work that was innovative and received a lot of attention within the field
• someone who seems to attract a lot of media attention
• someone whose work pertains to something trendy in the field

What do you think makes someone a rock star in the realm of scientific computing? And who would you nominate as a rock star? Tell us by filling out our poll below.