Special Session: Celebrating Jack Dongarra

This special session will celebrate the life and work of Jack Dongarra, who was the recipient of the 2021 ACM A.M. Turing Award. The award is named for Alan M. Turing, a British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing. Turing is considered by many to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. The Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” carries a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google, Inc. ACM bestowed the award for Dongarra’s pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries that enabled high performance computational software to keep pace with exponential hardware improvements for over four decades. As an ISC Fellow, Dongarra has been associated with conference from the beginning and is very well known to attendees as co-author of the TOP500 list of annual rankings of high performance computer systems. While not collecting awards and ranking supercomputers, Dongarra works as a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. He also holds appointments with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Manchester. To celebrate the award, ISC will hold this session to recognize Dongarra’s scientific achievements and contributions to HPC. It will take place on Monday, May 30, 2022 from 10:45 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and will be chaired by Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Simon will be joined by Tony Hey, Chief Data Scientist, Rutherford-Appleton-Laboratory, STFC, United Kingdom; David Keyes, Director, Extreme Computing, KAUST, Saudi-Arabia; and Satoshi Matsuoka, Director, RIKEN Center for Computational Science, Japan, who will offer their own perspectives on Dongarra’s work in benchmarking, linear algebra, and high performance computing.