As SC celebrates its 25th year, a new award has been created in recognition of the fact that the conference technical programme has been the launching point for many of the technical innovations that have radically reshaped the supercomputing community. The Test of Time award recognises a paper from a past conference that has deeply influenced the HPC discipline. According to SC, it is a mark of historical impact, and requires clear evidence that the paper has changed HPC trends. The award will be presented annually to a single paper selected from the conference proceedings of 10-25 years ago.
‘In any field, there are a few papers that have had a particularly large impact on the field,’ said William Gropp, the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, co-creator of MPI, and the general chair of SC13. ‘For the 25th anniversary of SC, we started the Test of Time award to recognise those papers from SC that have transformed high-performance computing, storage, or networking. Because of SC’s long history and high quality technical programme, we have many papers from which to choose!’
The inaugural Test of Time Award will be presented at SC13 in November to William Pugh for ‘The Omega Test: a fast and practical integer programming algorithm for dependence analysis’, published in the proceedings of Supercomputing’91. The selection process involved nine renowned researchers who nominated 13 papers for the period 1988 to 2002, covering the first 15 years of the SC conference series. The award committee, chaired by Franck Cappello, Argonne National Laboratory, and Leonid Oliker, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, selected the winner after a rigorous presentation and discussion of the merits of each contender.
As part of the award, Pugh will give a presentation during the awards session on the paper, its history, the research difficulties that had to be overcome to provide the result and the impact that the paper has had, both in HPC and beyond.
