ACM/IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship

Honors exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is on high-performance computing applications

Endowed in memory of George Michael, one of the founders of the SC Conference series, the ACM/IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship honors exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is on high-performance computing applications, networking, storage, or large-scale data analysis using the most powerful computers that are currently available.

The award committee is selected by the two societies and includes past winners as well as leaders in the field. The Fellowship includes a $5000 honorarium, recognition on the ACM, IEEE CS, and ACM SIGHPC websites, and travel expenses to attend SC. The recipients will be honored at the SC Conference Awards Ceremony

Nomination Process

Selection Criteria

Candidates must be enrolled in a full-time PhD program at an accredited college or university and must meet the minimum scholastic requirements at their institution. They are expected to have completed at least one year of study, and have at least one year remaining between the application deadline and their expected graduation.

The Fellowship reflects the two societies’ (ACM and IEEE CS) long-standing commitment to workforce diversity. Applications from women, minorities, international students, and all who contribute to diversity are encouraged. Advisees of committee members are not eligible for the award, nor can committee members provide recommendation letters. Applications will be evaluated based on the following factors:

overall potential for research excellence
degree to which technical interests align with those of the HPC community
demonstration of current and planned future use of HPC resources
evidence of a plan of study to enhance HPC-related skills
evidence of academic progress to-date, including presentations and publications
recommendation by faculty advisor

Submissions

Nominations for the George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship are in the form of self-nominations, submitted using the online nomination form. Materials must be prepared as specified below. Incomplete or incorrect nominations will be disqualified.

Name, address, phone number, and email address of nominator (in this case, the candidate is self-nominating).
Name and contact info for endorser (must be the candidate’s PhD advisor). After the nomination has been submitted, the student will receive an email confirming its receipt. That email will include an encrypted URL which must be forwarded to the advisor. The advisor will use the URL to submit a confidential letter of endorsement (not to exceed 1500 words). Note that it is the candidate’s responsibility to ensure that the advisor (a) receives the endorsement instructions, and (b) submits the endorsement before the deadline.
Suggested citation if the nomination is selected. This should be a concise statement (maximum of 25 words) describing your research. Note that the final wording for award announcements will be at the discretion of the Award Committee.
Nomination (PDF not exceeding 5 pages in length, following typical technical paper page standards: 11pt font, single spaced text, fitting within 7.5” x 10” text area). Note that the research interests should be explained in terms understandable to a non-specialist. Only nominations meeting all requirements, including length limitations, will be considered.

Educational Information (use a table listing each item in a separate row)

name of educational institution
name of department
name of department chair
enrollment basis (either Full Time or Other; explain if Other)
year and term PhD program was entered
most recent GPA
expected graduation date

Additional Candidate Information

primary telephone
alternate telephone

Statement of Research (2 pp max)

description of candidate’s research and its importance
progress to date
how candidate has used HPC in the past
plans for the remaining year(s) of graduate study

Publications, Reports, and Major Presentations

bibliographic-style listing, including names of all authors in the order they appeared on the title page/slide
system and environment where performance was measured (1 p max)

For questions on the above, please contact us at acm-awards@acm.org, or Jade Morris, ACM Awards Committee Liaison. ACM's conflict-of-interest guidelines apply to all award nominations.

2025 ACM/IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship Committee

ACM Representatives:

Elsa Gonsiorowski, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) - Chair
Giovanni Agosta, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Kate Cahill, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Christine Harvey, Mitre

IEEE Computer Society Representatives:

Tina M. Declerck, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Sunita Chandrasekaran, University of Delaware
Kathryn Mohror, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)
Samantika Sury, Samsung

About the Process

Past Recipients

2025 Yafan Huang: for high performance computing research excellence and plans to enhance and advance the field.
2025 Ana Luisa Veroneze Solorzano: for work to broaden the societal impact of HPC using privacy-preserving and incentive-driven mechanisms.
2024 Ke Fan: For contributions in optimizing the performance of MPI collectives, enhancing the performance of irregular parallel I/O operations, and improving the scalability of performance introspection frameworks.
2024 Daniel Nichols: For advancements in machine-learning based performance modeling and the advancement of large language models for HPC and scientific codes.
2023 J. Gregory Pauloski: For optimizing HPC resource usage via scalable optimization methods for deep learning training and improving the efficiency of data fabrics in applications spanning heterogeneous resources.
2023 Rohan Basu Roy: For methods and tools that exploit cloud computing and on-premise HPC resources to enhance the productivity of computational scientists and the sustainability of HPC.”
2023 Hua Huang - Honorable Mention: For contributions to high-performance parallel matrix algorithms and implementations and their application to quantum chemistry calculations.
2022 Marcin Copik: For incorporating the Function-as-a-Service programming model into HPC applications and bringing high performance into serverless to cut costs and increase the efficiency of supercomputing.
2022 Masado Alexander Ishii: For developing lightweight, dimension-parameterized parallel meshing algorithms, with a focus on scalability and improving total time-to-solution for engineering applications.
2022 Shelby Lockhart: For contributions to scalable iterative solvers using node-aware communication and low synchronization algorithms to reduce communication bottlenecks on supercomputers.
2021 Mert Hidayetoglu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: For contributions in scalable spare applications using fast algorithms and hierarchical communication on supercomputers with multi-GPU nodes.
2021 Tirtahk Patel, Northeastern University: Contributions toward making the current error-prone quantum computing systems more usable and helping HPC programmers solve computationally challenging problems.
2020 Kazem Cheshmi, University of Toronto: For developing Sympiler for automatically generating efficient parallel code for sparse scientific applications on supercomputers.
2020 Madhurima Vardhan, Duke University: For developing a memory light massively parallel computational fluid dynamic algorithm using routine clinical data to enable high fidelity simulations at ultrahigh resolutions.
2020 Keren Zhou, Rice University: For developing performance Tools for GPU-accelerated Applications.
2019 Milinda Shayamal Fernando, University of Utah: For his work on high performance algorithms for applications in relativity, geosciences and computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
2019 Staci A. Smith, University of Arizona: For her work developing a novel dynamic rerouting algorithm on fat-tree interconnects. The Fellowships are jointly presented by ACM and the IEEE Computer Society.
2018 Linda Gesenhues, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro: For her research on fluid dynamics of turbidity currents targeting advancing a 3D-fluid-solver for sedimentation focusing on viscoplastic flow behavior and its methods.
2018 Markus Höhnerbach, RWTH Aachen University: For his research on portable optimizations of complex molecular dynamics codes, utilizing abstraction layers and code generation to obtain high-performance, scalable implementations.
2017 Shaden Smith, University of Minnesota: For his work on efficient and parallel large-scale sparse tensor factorization for machine learning applications.
2017 Yang You, University of California, Berkeley: For his work on designing accurate, fast, and scalable machine learning algorithms on distributed systems.
2016 Johann Rudi, The Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (The University of Texas at Austin): Extreme-Scale Implicit Solver for Nonlinear, Multiscale, and Heterogeneous Stokes Flow in the Earth’s Mantle.
2016 Axel Huebl, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (Technical University of Dresden): Scalable, Many-core Particle-in-cell Algorithms to Simulate Next Generation Particle Accelerators and Corresponding Large-scale Data Analytics.
2015 Maciej Besta, ETH Zurich: His project is entitled "Accelerating Large-Scale Distributed Graph Computations"
2015 Dhairya Malhotra, University of Texas Austin: His project is entitled "Scalable Algorithms for Evaluating Volume Potentials"
2014 Harshitha Menon, University of Illinois: Her project is entitled "Scalable Load Balancing and Adaptive Run Time Techniques"
2014 Alexander Breuer, Technische Universität München: His project is entitled "Petascale High Order Earthquake Simulations"
2013 Jonathan Lifflander, University of Illinoi
2013 Edgar Solomonik, University of California, Berkeley
2012 Amanda Peters Randles, Harvard University - Applications, Biomedical
2012 Ryan Gabrys, UCLA - Computer Science, Storage
2012 Honorable Mention Yanhua Sun, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign - Computer Science, Performance
2012 Honorable Mention Gagan Gupta, University of Wisconsin-Madison - Computer Science
2011 Ignacio Laguna, Purdue University
2011 Xinyu Que, Auburn University
2011 Honorable Mention Leonardo Arturo Bautista Gomez, Tokyo Institute of Technology
2011 Honorable Mention Michael J. Duchene, University of Notre Dame
2010 Amanda Peters, Harvard University - Applications, Biomedical
2010 Aparna Chandramowlishwaran, Georgia Institute of Technology - Algorithms
2009 Nathan Tallent, Rice University - Computer Science
2009 Abhinav Bhatele, University of Illinois – Urbana/Champaign - Computer Science
2009 Honorable Mention Mark Silberstein, Technion - Israel - Applications, Biology
2009 Honorable Mention Amanda Peters, Harvard University - Applications, Biomedical
2008 Yaniv Erlich, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory - Applications, Biology
2008 Douglas J. Mason, Harvard University - Physics/ Applications and Algorithms
2008 Yong Chen, Illinois Institute of Technology - Systems
2008 Honorable Mention Daniel Quest, University of Nebraska Medical Center - Application, Biology
2008 Honorable Mention Samer Al Kiswany, University of British Columbia - Systems and Storage
2008 Honorable Mention Sean M. Couch, The University of Texas at Austin - Applications, Astronomy
2007 Mark Hoemmen, University of California at Berkeley - Computer Science, Algorithms
2007 Arpith Jacob, Washington University in St. Louis - Architecture, Genomics
2007 Chao Wang, North Carolina State University - Computer Science, Storage
2007 Honorable Mention Yong Chen, Illinois Institute of Technology - Applications, CFD
2007 Honorable Mention Kamesh Madduri, Georgia Institute of Technology - Computer Science, Algorithms