Jack Dongarra, one of today’s most distinguished HPC leaders, is adding two awards to his long list.
The Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) recently honored Dongarra with the High Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing Achievement Award at the annual High Performance and Distributed Computing Conference in Kyoto, Japan, while the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) will bestow him with the Super Computing (SC) 2016 Test of Time Award at its conference in November.
Readers of HPCwire are very familiar with Dongarra who is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Tennessee and wears very many other important hats in the HPC community – not least as a driving force in the creation and maintenance of the TOP500 List.
Last November, the readers of HPCwire accorded Dongarra another honor when he was selected as one of two Reader’s Choice Award winners in HPCwire’s inaugural Outstanding Leadership in HPC Award. The other winner was Satoshi Matsuoka, a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology (TiTech) and leader of the TSUBAME series of supercomputers, for their remarkable contributions to the high performance computing community.
The recent ACM award recognized Dongarra’s extensive and influential research done advancing parallel computing. His expertise in that form of computing dates back decades and includes his work as editor of the groundbreaking Sourcebook of Parallel Computing in 2003.
“While the award itself is an honor, it also calls attention to the impact a long-term commitment to experimental computer science work can have on scientific discovery,” he said in a brief article posted on the University of Tennessee website. “That impact affects everything from economics to high-energy physics, from human health to geology.”
As the name implies, the SC award goes to innovation that has stood the test of time—in this case, a paper Dongarra authored in 2000 with Clint Whaley titled Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software (ATLAS).
ATLAS is a particular form of technology known as autotuning, a program that can optimize itself to the highest levels of performance for different computer hardware. A major step up from preceding programs because of the way it self-optimizes, ATLAS continues to be cited and relied upon as a baseline measurement in the scientific community almost two decades after its release—an eternity in the world of computing.
Congratulations Prof. Dongarra!
Link to the full article posted today on the University of Tennessee website: http://tntoday.utk.edu/2016/06/16/dongarra-honored-pair-prestigious-supercomputing-awards/