August 15, 2019 — There are SC papers that become milestones; their contributions end up defining and driving the research of many. These papers often go on to win the Test of Time Award (ToTA). We are pleased to announce the selection of the SC08 paper, “Benchmarking GPUs to Tune Dense Linear Algebra”, by Vasily Volkov (NVIDIA) and James Demmel (UC Berkeley) as the SC19 ToTA winner.
The paper was deemed deserving of the SC19 ToTA due to its first-of-its-kind vision of GPU architectures as a vector machine. By building on this vision, Volkov and Demmel defined techniques to achieve greater efficiency and performance. Since 2008, this vision has resulted in a way of thinking and modeling algorithms on GPUs that still guide others to pursue and obtain high performance across the larger and larger GPU community. Written while both authors were at UC Berkeley, the paper has had a tremendous impact with nearly 1,000 citations, and it is still being cited more than a decade after its publication.
Vasily Volkov is with NVIDIA in Santa Clara, California, where he is applying his expertise to the next generation of GPUs.
James Demmel continues to nurture the next generation of HPC experts at UC Berkeley.
Meet the Authors at SC19
When informed of being the recipients of the SC19 ToTA, Volkov and Demmel were delighted and honored to have their paper recognized with one of the most prestigious SC19 awards. “This was our attempt to understand how GPUs work and how to efficiently program them. Our resulting algorithms ran significantly faster than the vendor’s code, and near machine peak,” said Demmel. He added, “We look forward to speaking about this paper to describe how this effort on GPU performance optimization has evolved.”
Volkov and Demmel will reveal their thoughts, share their challenges, and discuss the impact of their work in an invited talk at SC19 on Tuesday, November 19, 3:30 pm–4:15 pm, in the Mile High Ballroom.
Source: Jeffrey K. Hollingsworth, SC19 Test of Time Award Chair