On March 30, the “Nobel Prize in Computing” Turing Award was announced, and Jack J. Dongarra, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, was awarded for his contributions to the development of high-performance computing. Commend.
Jack J. Dongarra since 1989 He has been a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee and a Distinguished Research Fellow in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rice University.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) wrote on its website that the ACM Turing Award was awarded to JACK J. DONGARRA for his pioneering concepts and methods, which Advances computing that changes the world. His pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries have enabled high-performance computing software to keep pace with exponential hardware updates for over four decades.
Dongarra said in an interview with ZD Net that, in his view, his most important contributions included three things, “one of which was the design and construction of high Numerical software running on a performance machine that can gain performance and be portable to other machines and architectures.” This was followed by his work on parallel processing mechanisms, including the widely used “Message-Passing Interface” (MPI, Message-Passing Interface). Third, a performance evaluation technique that measures the speed at which a computer runs, which has become a TOP500 list of supercomputers.
“allThese efforts are focused on advanced computer architectures and how to use them very efficiently,” said Dongarra.
The ACM Turing Award is often referred to as “the promise of computing Bell Prize”, a $1 million prize funded by Google and named after Alan M. Turing, a world pioneer in computer science.
For nearly four decades, Moore’s Law has been known to lead to exponential increases in hardware performance. At the same time, while most software has not kept pace with At the pace of these hardware advancements, high-performance numerical software has done so – thanks in large part to Dongarra’s algorithms, optimization techniques, and production-quality software implementation.
Jack Dongarra in 1980
“I’m a mathematician, and to me, everything is linear algebra, but the world is seeing that,” Dongarra once said in an interview. “This is the material we use to build other things. Most problems in machine learning and artificial intelligence can be traced back to the ‘eternal computational component’ in linear algebra.”
According to ACM, Dongarra’s main contribution is the creation of open-source software libraries and standards that use linear algebra as an intermediate language that can be used by a variety of applications. These libraries are written for single processors, parallel computers, multi-core nodes, and multiple GPUs per node. The library created by Dongarra also introduced many important innovations, including auto-tuning, mixed-precision arithmetic, and batch computing.
All of Dongarra’s efforts culminated in linear algebra-based software libraries enabling high-performance scientific and Engineering computing, these libraries enable increasingly powerful computers to solve computationally challenging problems.
ACM Chairman Gabriele Kotsis said, “Today’s fastest supercomputers grabbed headlines in the media and achieved the astonishing feat of performing a trillion calculations in a second. to spark public interest. In addition to breaking new records, high performance computing has been a major tool for scientific discovery. Innovation in high performance computing has also spread to many different computing fields, driving the entire field. Jack Dongarra is leading this He has played a central role in the successful development of the field. His pioneering work dates back to 1979, and he remains one of the most important and engaged leaders in the high-performance computing community. His career undoubtedly reflects the The Spirit Award recognizes ‘significant contributions of lasting importance'”.
“Jack Dongarra’s work has fundamentally changed and advanced scientific computing,” said Jeff Dean, a senior researcher at Google and senior vice president of Google Health, “he uses The deep and important work done at the heart of the most frequent numerical library underlies every field of scientific computing, helping to advance everything from drug discovery to weather forecasting, aerospace engineering, and dozens of others, and he focuses on characterization A wide range of computers has led to significant advances in computer architecture, which are well suited for numerical computing.”
Dongarra said in an interview that he is learning to build on top of all linear algebra code of various machine learning AI techniques, he strongly believes in the benefits AI will bring to engineering and science.
“Machine learning is an important tool to help solve scientific problems,” said Dongarra, “We are just beginning to understand how AI and machine learning can be used to help solve these problems. It It won’t solve our problem, it will help us solve it.”