ACM Turing Award Honors Jack J. Dongarra

ACM, ACM Turing Award Honors Jack J. Dongarra for Pioneering Concepts and Methods Which Have Resulted in World-Changing Computations, March 30, 2022.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Jack J. Dongarra recipient of the 2021 ACM A.M. Turing Award for pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries that enabled high performance computational software to keep pace with exponential hardware improvements for over four decades. Dongarra is 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.

Numerical linear algebra:

Dongarra’s major contribution was in creating open-source software libraries and standards which employ linear algebra as an intermediate language that can be used by a wide variety of applications. These libraries have been written for single processors, parallel computers, multicore nodes, and multiple GPUs per node. Dongarra’s libraries also introduced many important innovations including autotuning, mixed precision arithmetic, and batch computations.

As a leading ambassador of high-performance computing, Dongarra led the field in persuading hardware vendors to optimize these methods, and software developers to target his open-source libraries in their work. Ultimately, these efforts resulted in linear algebra-based software libraries achieving nearly universal adoption for high performance scientific and engineering computation on machines ranging from laptops to the world’s fastest supercomputers. These libraries were essential in the growth of the field—allowing progressively more powerful computers to solve computationally challenging problems. 

Contributions:

For over four decades, Dongarra has been the primary implementor or principal investigator for many libraries such as LINPACK, BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, PLASMA, MAGMA, and SLATE. These libraries have been written for single processors, parallel computers, multicore nodes, and multiple GPUs per node. His software libraries are used, practically universally, for high performance scientific and engineering computation on machines ranging from laptops to the world’s fastest supercomputers.