Victor H. Reis

Victor H. Reis is a technologist and former U.S. government official, best known as the architect and original sponsor of the U.S. nuclear and its associated Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), which resulted in the creation of several new generations of government-sponsored supercomputers.

Reis graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a B.S. degree in 1957. He earned an M.S. at Yale University in 1958 and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1962. From 1973 to 1981, Reis was a technical staff member at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.

Reis was Assistant Director for National Security and Space in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President, 1981-1983. Leaving government, he became senior vice president for strategic planning at the Science Applications International Corp., 1983-1989. He returned briefly to Lincoln Laboratory in 1989 as special assistant to the director, then returned to government as, first, Deputy Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1989–1990; then that agency's Director, 1990–1991; and subsequently Director of Defense Research and Engineering at the U.S. Department of Defense, where he succeeded Charles M. Herzfeld and served until 1993, when he was succeeded by Anita K. Jones.

Reis served as Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs in the U.S. Department of Energy from 1993 to 1999, where he led the development of the DOE's Stockpile Stewardship Program, which was formally established by the 1994 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 103-160). After the U.S. moratorium on nuclear testing in 1992, Reis was among the first to recognize the need for a new, formal program in maintaining the U.S. nuclear stockpile, replacing data formerly obtained by testing with data from supercomputer simulation and small-scale non-nuclear experiments. The Stockpile Stewardship Program, and its associated initiatives in supercomputing, modeling, and simulation, led to the creation of several new generations of supercomputers.

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