The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society recently announced the winners of three awards that are highly regarded by the high performance computing community:
- ACM/IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award
- IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award
- IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award
2016 ACM/IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award
William D. Gropp, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was awarded the 2016 ACM/IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for his influential contributions to the programmability of high-performance parallel and distributed computers. Gropp was one of the leaders in the development of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. MPI has become the de facto standard for programming distributed-memory computers in scientific applications, and has enabled a wide range of scientists and engineers to use the enormous performance potential of highly parallel computer systems for over two decades. He was a key author in the development of MPI-I, MPI-2, and MPI-3. As part of the standardization process, Gropp also designed and developed MPICH, the first functional implementation of MPI. This freely available software remains one of the most widely used implementations of MPI, with nearly 2,000 downloads per month.
William Gropp
Along with collaborators David Keyes and Xiao-Chuan Cai, Gropp developed and analyzed key scalable parallel algorithms for adaptive mesh refinement and domain decomposition methods, which are now widely used in parallel applications. This work led to the development of a numerical library, the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc), which Gropp developed in collaboration with Barry Smith. PETSc has been used in a variety of applications, including nano-simulations, biology, fusion, geosciences, environmental modeling, fluid dynamics and software engineering, among others.
In 2011, Gropp helped launch the ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC), the first international group devoted to the needs of students, faculty and practitioners in high performance computing. He also served as the editor of CONNECT, the newsletter for SIGHPC, as chair of the Gordon Bell Prize Committee, and in various capacities for numerous conference committees.
Gropp holds the Thomas M. Siebel Chair of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also the Acting Director and Chief Scientist of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He has authored more than 187 technical publications, including the book Using MPI, which is in its third edition and has sold over 18,000 copies. Gropp received the 2014 SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering, along with the PETSc Core Development Team (Satish Balay, Jed Brown, Matthew Knepley, Lois Curfman McInnes, Barry Smith and Hong Zhang). He was elected an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and SIAM Fellow, and is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.
Established in memory of Ken Kennedy, the founder of Rice University’s nationally ranked computer science program and one of the world’s foremost experts on high-performance computing. A certificate and $5,000 honorarium are awarded jointly by the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society for outstanding contributions to programmability or productivity in high-performance computing together with significant community service or mentoring contributions.
2016 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award
William Camp, Director Emeritus at Sandia National Laboratories, was awarded the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award for his visionary leadership of the Red Storm project, and for decades of leadership of the HPC community.
Camp has had a distinguished and prolific career of scientific and high performance leadership achievements in computational science and high performance computing spanning efforts as a user of computing, a leader of computational research, an advocate for computation as a major pillar of science and engineering, and for specific contributions to massively parallel computational methods and massively parallel hardware/software architectures.
William Camp
A pinnacle achievement of Camp was his visionary leadership of the development of the Red Storm supercomputer. In 2000, Dr. Camp and his colleague, Jim Tomkins developed and patented the Red Storm architecture; and Dr. Camp led a partnership with Cray to build it. ASCI Red Storm became the Cray XT3 and the follow-on XT-series, which are arguably the most successful supercomputers to date.
In 2006, Camp joined Intel as Chief Supercomputing Architect and directed Intel’s Exascale R&D efforts. His team’s work led to detailed architectures and conceptual designs for Exascale. Bill also led Intel’s efforts to create joint Exascale labs with leading European computing centers. Bill received two Intel individual achievement awards recognizing those accomplishments.
Currently, Camp consults on computing technologies for post-Exascale computing. He spent most of his career at NNSA’s Sandia Labs, at Cray Research and at Intel. At Sandia, he founded DOE’s Massively Parallel Computing Research Lab (MPCRL). In its first 5 years the MPCRL won the inaugural Gordon Bell Prize, several other international awards, and 8 R&D100 Awards– all for pioneering highly scalable applications, algorithms, and methods as well as for developing scalable systems software and hardware. The MPCRL received over 30 patents for MPP technologies.
Established in late 1997. A crystal memento, illuminated certificate, and $10,000 honorarium are awarded to recognize innovative contributions to high performance computing systems that best exemplify the creative spirit demonstrated by Seymour Cray.
2016 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award
Vipin Kumar, a professor at University of Minnesota, Computer Science and Engineering Department, was awarded the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award for his foundational work on understanding scalability, and highly-scalable algorithms for graph partitioning, sparse linear systems and data mining. He is a Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, where he holds the William Norris Endowed Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Kumar received the B.E. degree in Electronics & Communication Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (formerly, University of Roorkee), India, in 1977, the M.E. degree in Electronics Engineering from Philips International Institute, Eindhoven, Netherlands, in 1979, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park, in 1982.
Vipin Kumar
Prof. Kumar is known world-wide for his seminal contributions to parallel and distributed computing and to the emerging field of Big Data. His work on analyzing the scalability of parallel systems using the isoefficiency metric has provided the basis for designing and evaluating large scale parallel computers. Algorithms and software developed by his group for solving large sparse linear systems, graph partitioning, and high performance data mining are critical for diverse scientific, engineering, and biomedical, applications. He has played a pioneering role in bringing Big Data and earth science together to address one of the grand challenges of our times—understanding the impact of human induced changes on the earth system and its environment. He is the Lead PI of a 5-year, $10 Million project, “Understanding Climate Change – A Data Driven Approach”, funded by the NSF’s Expeditions in Computing program that is aimed at defining the future of computing and information.
He has authored over 300 research articles, and has coedited or coauthored 10 books including two text books “Introduction to Parallel Computing” and “Introduction to Data Mining”, that are used world-wide and have been translated into many languages. Kumar’s foundational research in data mining and its applications to scientific data was honored by the ACM SIGKDD 2012 Innovation Award, which is the highest award for technical excellence in the field of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD).
Kumar is an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of IEEE, and a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science.Established in 1992 in memory of Sidney Fernbach, one of the pioneers in the development and application of high performance computers for the solution of large computational problems. A certificate and $2,000 are awarded for outstanding contributions in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches.
The societies also announced the recipients of the IEEE-CS TCHPC Award for Excellence for Early Career Researchers in High Performance Computing:
- Kyle Chard, Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
- Sunita Chandrasekaran, Assistant Professor, University of Delaware
- Seyong Lee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Other upcoming awards are as follows:
SC Best Paper Award:
Each year, the SC Technical Papers Committee identifies one paper as the best paper from the Conference’s Technical Program. The award will be announced at the SC16 awards ceremony.
SC Best Student Paper Award:
Each year, the SC Technical Papers Committee identifies one paper as the best paper written primarily by a student or students and presented in the Conference’s Technical Program. Papers must be identified as student papers when submitted to be eligible for this award. This award will be announced at the SC16 awards ceremony.
SC Best Poster Award:
Each year, the SC Posters Committee identifies one poster as the best poster presented as part of the Conference’s Technical Program. The award will be announced at the SC16 awards ceremony.
SC Test of Time Award:
The “Test of Time” award recognizes a paper from a past SC conference that has deeply influenced the HPC discipline. It is a mark of historical impact, and requires clear evidence that the paper has changed HPC trends. The award was originally presented at SC13, as part of the celebration of the SC 25th anniversary. It is presented annually to a single paper, selected from the conference proceedings of 10-25 years ago.
