Cleve Moler to Receive 2011 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award
LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 3 October, 2011 – Cleve Moler, a mathematician and computational scientist specializing in numerical analysis, was selected this year’s winner of the IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award.
Moler was honored “for fundamental contributions to linear algebra, mathematical software, and enabling tools for computational science.” He is scheduled to accept the award at the keynote session at SC11 in Seattle, Washington on Tuesday morning, 15 November.
Established in 1992 in memory of high-performance computing pioneer Sidney Fernbach, the award recognizes outstanding contributions in the application of high-performance computers using innovative approaches. The award consists of a certificate and a $2,000 honorarium.
Moler is the chairman and chief mathematician of MathWorks, the company that he and Jack Little founded in 1984 to commercialize and develop MATLAB, a high-level technical computing environment.
Moler spent nearly two decades as a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the University of New Mexico. While a mathematics professor and computer science chair at UNM in the 1970s and 1980s, he developed several packages of mathematical software for computational science and engineering.
Before joining MathWorks full-time in 1989, he spent five years with two computer hardware manufacturers, the Intel Hypercube organization and Ardent Computer.
Moler is one of the authors of the LINPACK and EISPACK scientific subroutine libraries, as well as author or co-author of five text books on numerical analysis and computational science. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a past president of SIAM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
James W. Demmel, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, received the 2010 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award for his contributions to high-performance linear algebra software. Demmel was Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s fourth Fernbach Award winner. The other Berkeley Lab awardees are David Bailey (1993), Phillip Colella (1998), and John Bell (2005).
Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello, developers of the Car Parrinello Molecular Dynamics (CPMD) approach, were the 2009 co-recipients of the Fernbach award. Previous Sidney Fernbach Award recipients include Marsha Berger (2004), Jack J. Dongarra (2003), William Gropp (2008), David Keyes (2007), and Edward Seidel (2006).
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James Demmel Receives 2010 Sidney Fernbach Award
LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 30 September, 2010 – James W. Demmel has been named the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award for his contributions to high-performance linear algebra software.
Demmel is a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Dr. Richard Carl Dehmel Distinguished Professorship of Engineering. He is the founding chair of the graduate group in Computational Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley, which includes 117 participating faculty from 22 departments. Demmel also has a joint appointment as a member of the Future Technologies Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
He received the award "for computational science leadership in creating adaptive, innovative, high-performance linear algebra software." The award to Demmel brings to four the number of Fernbach Award recipients at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In addition to Demmel, other Berkeley Lab awardees are David Bailey (1993), Phillip Colella (1998), and John Bell (2005).
Involved in the design and development of algorithms and mathematical software for the past two decades, Demmel is known for his work on LAPACK and ScaLAPACK, which form the standard mathematical libraries for AMD, Apple (under Mac OS X), Cray, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, IMSL/Rogue Wave, Intel, InteractiveSupercomputing, several Linux distributions (including Debian), Mathworks (MATLAB), NAG, NEC, PGI, and SGI.
The software and standards Demmel developed enable users to transition their computer programs to new high-performance computers without having to re-implement the basic building blocks. The software is used by hundreds of sites worldwide, including all U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, NASA research laboratories, many universities, and companies in the aerospace, automotive, chemical, computer, environmental, medical, oil, and pharmaceutical industries.
His parallel direct sparse linear equation solver SuperLU (with Xiaoye Sherry Li) was used to solve a quantum mechanical three-body scattering problem, leading to a 1999 cover article in Science magazine. His parallel unstructured 3D multigrid solver for finite element problems Prometheus (with Mark Adams) won the Carl Benz Award for the best industrial application at the Mannheim Supercomputer’99 Conference. His parallel eigensolver in ScaLAPACK (with Jack Dongarra and Ken Stanley) was runner-up in the Gordon Bell Peak Performance Prize at SC98.
Demmel is a fellow of IEEE, ACM, and SIAM, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He was the recipient of the J. H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing in 1993, the SIAM SIAG on Linear Algebra Prize in 1988 and 1991, a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1986, and an IBM Faculty Development Award in 1985, among others.
He received his BS in mathematics from Caltech in 1975 and his PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley in 1983. After spending six years on the faculty of New York University’s Courant Institute, Demmel joined the computer science and mathematics department at UC Berkeley in 1990.
Established in 1992 in memory of high-performance computing pioneer Sidney Fernbach, the award recognizes outstanding contributions in the application of high-performance computers using innovative approaches. Set to be presented on 17 November at SC10, the award consists of a certificate and a $2,000 honorarium.
Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello, developers of the Car Parrinello Molecular Dynamics (CPMD) approach, were the 2009 co-recipients of the Fernbach award. Previous Sidney Fernbach Award recipients include Marsha Berger, Jack J. Dongarra, William Gropp, David Keyes, and Edward Seidel.
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Car and Parrinello Named 2009 Fernbach Winners
LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 15 October, 2009 — Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello, developers of the Car Parrinello Molecular Dynamics (CPMD) approach, are joint recipients of the 2009 Sidney Fernbach Award.
The pair laid the foundation for a modern approach to the chemistry and physics of materials. Their methodology was revolutionary, increasing the speed of simulations and propelling a major force in science. Such simulations are now used in physics, materials science, chemistry, semiconductors, surface science, catalysis, biological processes, mineralogy, and the new field of nano-sized structures, including industrial applications.
“The Fernbach Award recognizes the leadership of doctors Car and Parrinello in creating the modern theoretical and practical foundations for materials modeling,“ said IEEE Computer Society President Susan K. (Kathy) Land.
The approach to molecular dynamics calculations and density functional theory that they developed increased the speed of materials simulations and shifted models from analysis of small systems with the capacity to understand deeper and more complex processes.
CPMD has become the leading code in high-performance computing usage. The algorithm is a breakthrough in computer simulation that is at the root of other combined quantum/classical simulations, unifying two separate scientific communities; classical computer simulations and electronic structure calculations.
“Simply put, the Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics (CPMD) approach is a one of the key enablers of complex materials modeling and a workhorse of computational science,” said Fernbach Award Selection Committee Chair Daniel Reed.
Car and Parrinello are set to receive their award and deliver a plenary speech at 11:15 a.m. on Wednesday, 17 November at SC09 in Portland, Oregon.
Car is the Ralph W. Dornte 31 Professor in Chemistry at Princeton University. He is a Fellow of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science (PCTS), and is affiliated with the Department of Physics, the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM), and the Program in Computational and Applied Mathematics (PACM).
He received a doctorate in physics from the Milan Institute of Technology. Before joining Princeton University in 1999, he worked at the University of Milan, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, and the University of Geneva.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK), a recipient of an honorary doctorate, and was awarded the 2009 Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, the Raman Prize for Computational Physics from the American Physical Society in 1995, and the Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Solid State Physics from the European Physical Society in 1990. In 2008, he received a Humboldt Foundation research award for senior US scientists.
His research has focused on understanding the physical and chemical properties of matter in condensed and molecular phases using computational methods based on first-principles microscopic quantum theory.
Parrinello has been professor of computational science at ETH Zurich since 2001 and for part of this time was also director of the Swiss Center for Scientific Computing (CSCS) in Manno, Switzerland. Prior to joining ETH, he was director at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany; manager at the IBM Research Laboratory in Zurich; and professor at SISSA in Trieste, Italy.
Parrinello's scientific interests include the study of complex chemical reactions, hydrogen-bonded systems, catalysis, materials science and large-scale motion in proteins.
He holds five honorary doctorates and received the 2009 Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, the 2006 Somaini prize of the Italian Physical Society, the 2001 American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry, the 1995 Raman prize, and the 1990 Europhysics prize. He is a member of the Royal Society (UK), the Accademia dei Lincei (Italy), the Max Planck Institute (Germany), the American Physical Society, the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science, and the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Established in 1992 in memory of high-performance computing pioneer Sidney Fernbach, the award recognizes innovative approaches to HPC applications. It acknowledges outstanding contributions in developing numerical algorithms and mathematical software that are important for computational modeling and simulation, or for using high-performance computers to solve large computational problems.
William Gropp, a developer of the message passing interface, was the 2008 winner of the Fernbach Award. Previous Sidney Fernbach Award recipients include Edward Seidel, John B. Bell, Marsha Berger, and Jack J. Dongarra.
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