The University of Tennessee’s Jack Dongarra is to receive the prestigious ACM-IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for 2013 during the international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, SC13, in November. ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, and IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, have awarded prominent figures in the high-performance computing (HPC) community with this award since its inception in 2009.
Dongarra was selected to receive the 2013 award for his work in developing mathematical software, standards, and parallel processing methods that revolutionised the practice of supercomputing worldwide. In addition to his role as a Distinguished Professor at the University of Tennessee, USA, Dongarra is a senior research staff scientist at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a Turing Fellow at the University of Manchester in the UK, and an Adjunct Professor at Rice University, USA. He is also the Director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory and the Center for Information Technology Research at the University of Tennessee.
‘It is very difficult to overstate the contribution of Jack’s research and leadership in the field of supercomputing,’ remarked Bill Gropp, the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, co-creator of MPI, and the general chair of SC13. ‘By focusing on software and methods that allow users and application developers to focus on science, rather than the arcane intricacies of processor and machine performance, Jack’s work has directly enabled much of the innovation that HPC has brought to our society.’
As well as being an elected an ACM Fellow in 2001, Dongarra is also an AAAS, IEEE, and SIAM Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In addition, he received the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award in 2004 for his innovations in HPC; the IEEE Medal of Excellence in Scalable Computing in 2008; the SIAM Special Interest Group on Supercomputing award for his career achievements in 2010; and the IEEE IPDPS Charles Babbage Award in 2011.
