Dec. 1 — UT Professor Jack Dongarra plays a major role in the world of supercomputing, and those efforts recently earned him national recognition.

Dongarra, who serves as director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at UT, was chosen by readers of HPCwire as one of its two recipients of the award for Outstanding Leadership in High Performance Computing (HPC).

“This award means a lot in a professional sense because it is a validation of some of the efforts, research and collaborations I’ve been fortunate enough to have over the years,” said Dongarra, a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the College of Engineering. “To have your peers recognize you for the work you have done is very satisfying.”

Tokyo Institute of Technology Professor Satoshi Matsuoka shared the award with Dongarra in a tie vote.

In honoring Dongarra, HPCwire noted that as “a co-founder of the Top500, developer of the BLAS, LAPACK, MPI, ATLAS, and PAPI (all of which are HPC programs, formulas, or software) and other packages it is difficult to overstate Jack Dongarra’s impact on HPC.”

Compiled with the help of collaborators at Berkeley National Laboratory and in Germany, the Top500 is a list of the world’s 500 most powerful systems. The most recent version of the list—the forty-sixth edition—came out last week, with China holding the No. 1 system for the sixth time in a row, while the Cray XK7 housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory came in second again.

Part of the goal of maintaining the list is keeping the focus on such high-end computing, something else HPCwire noted in its praise of Dongarra.

“(He) has long been a champion of the need for algorithms, numerical libraries, and software for HPC, especially at extreme scale,” HPCwire said. “His research includes the development, testing and documentation of high quality mathematical software.”

The award is the latest in a distinguished career for Dongarra, including numerous career achievement awards as well as his having been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

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Source: The University of Tennessee at Knoxville