Thirty Years of the Gordon Bell Prize
SessionInvited Talks 2
Presenter
Event Type
Invited Talk
TimeTuesday, November 14th3:30pm -
4:15pm
LocationMile High Ballroom
DescriptionThe Gordon Bell Prizes have chronicled the important
innovations and transitions of HPC beginning with the
first award in 1987. Gustafson, Montry, and Benner
demonstrated Amdahl's Law was not impenetrable. By 1994,
MPI provided both a model and standard for rapid
adoption, Beowulf became the recipe for building
clusters, and a Thinking Machines cluster significantly
outperformed the fastest Cray shared memory
multiprocessor. The prize has recognized every gain in
parallelism from widely distributed workstations to the
Sunway 10 million core processor in 2016. The overlap
from the Seymour Cray recipe of a shared memory,
multi-vector processor (aka Fortran Computer) to today's
multicomputer turned out to show up and be incredibly
fast. Hopefully, the prize has helped the rapid adoption
of new paradigms, e.g. GPUs and possibly FPGAs. The
prize also recognized the value of specialized hardware.
Finally, the prize recognizes the tremendous effort and
creativity required with algorithms, computational
science, and computer science to exploit the
increasingly parallelism afforded by the computers as
seen in the increase in number of authors.
Presenter
