His research is centered on parallel processing, with an emphasis on parallel computer architectures and compilation for these machines. Dr. O 'Keefe formed the Parallel and Computer Systems Laboratory at the University of Minnesota, where research is both industrially and academically oriented. He has worked with others on the Miami Isopycnic Coordinate Ocean Model (MICOM) where his role was developing versions of MICOM suitable for execution on massively parallel processors and shared-memory multiprocessors.