The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, reporting nearly 110,000 student and professional members as of 2022. Its headquarters are in New York City.
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standardized and portable message-passing standard designed to function on parallel computing architectures. The MPI standard defines the syntax and semantics of library routines that are useful to a wide range of users writing portable message-passing programs in C, C++, and Fortran. There are several open-source MPI implementations, which fostered the development of a parallel software industry, and encouraged development of portable and scalable large-scale parallel applications.
Jack Joseph Dongarra is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the American University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. He holds the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Turing Fellowship in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester, and is an adjunct professor and teacher in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He served as a faculty fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study (2014–2018). Dongarra is the founding director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. He was the recipient of the Turing Award in 2021.
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as the Chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Computational Science & Engineering, where he was also a founding professor, and the executive director of High-Performance Computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. In 2007, he was named the first director of the Sony Toshiba IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Processor at Georgia Tech.
Chapel, the Cascade High Productivity Language, is a parallel programming language that was developed by Cray, and later by Hewlett Packard Enterprise which acquired Cray. It was being developed as part of the Cray Cascade project, a participant in DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program, which had the goal of increasing supercomputer productivity by 2010. It is being developed as an open source project, under version 2 of the Apache license.
Many-task computing (MTC) in computational science is an approach to parallel computing that aims to bridge the gap between two computing paradigms: high-throughput computing (HTC) and high-performance computing (HPC).
SC, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, is the annual conference established in 1988 by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society. In 2019, about 13,950 people participated overall; by 2022 attendance had rebounded to 11,830 both in-person and online. The not-for-profit conference is run by a committee of approximately 600 volunteers who spend roughly three years organizing each conference.
The Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, also known as the Seymour Cray Award, is an award given by the IEEE Computer Society, to recognize significant and innovative contributions in the field of high-performance computing. The award honors scientists who exhibit the creativity demonstrated by Seymour Cray, founder of Cray Research, Inc., and an early pioneer of supercomputing. Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which built many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. He played a key role in the invention and design of the UNIVAC 1103, a landmark high-speed computer and the first computer available for commercial use.
The Ken Kennedy Award, established in 2009 by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society in memory of Ken Kennedy, is awarded annually and recognizes substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and substantial community service or mentoring contributions. The award includes a $5,000 honorarium and the award recipient will be announced at the ACM - IEEE Supercomputing Conference.
Tachyon is a parallel/multiprocessor ray tracing software. It is a parallel ray tracing library for use on distributed memory parallel computers, shared memory computers, and clusters of workstations. Tachyon implements rendering features such as ambient occlusion lighting, depth-of-field focal blur, shadows, reflections, and others. It was originally developed for the Intel iPSC/860 by John Stone for his M.S. thesis at University of Missouri-Rolla. Tachyon subsequently became a more functional and complete ray tracing engine, and it is now incorporated into a number of other open source software packages such as VMD, and SageMath. Tachyon is released under a permissive license.
Cherri M. Pancake is an ethnographer and computer scientist who works as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and Intel Faculty Fellow at Oregon State University, and as the director of the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science & Engineering. She is known for her pioneering work on usability engineering for high performance computing. In 2018 she was elected for a two-year term as president of the Association for Computing Machinery.
An AI accelerator, deep learning processor, or neural processing unit is a class of specialized hardware accelerator or computer system designed to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, including artificial neural networks and machine vision. Typical applications include algorithms for robotics, Internet of Things, and other data-intensive or sensor-driven tasks. They are often manycore designs and generally focus on low-precision arithmetic, novel dataflow architectures or in-memory computing capability. As of 2024, a typical AI integrated circuit chip contains tens of billions of MOSFET transistors.
In the high-performance computing environment, burst buffer is a fast intermediate storage layer positioned between the front-end computing processes and the back-end storage systems. It bridges the performance gap between the processing speed of the compute nodes and the Input/output (I/O) bandwidth of the storage systems. Burst buffers are often built from arrays of high-performance storage devices, such as NVRAM and SSD. It typically offers from one to two orders of magnitude higher I/O bandwidth than the back-end storage systems.
Richard Vuduc is a tenured professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research lab, The HPC Garage, studies high-performance computing, scientific computing, parallel algorithms, modeling, and engineering. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). As of 2022, Vuduc serves as Vice President of the SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing. He has co-authored over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.
Ilkay Altintas is a Turkish-American data and computer scientist, and researcher in the domain of supercomputing and high-performance computing applications. Since 2015, Altintas has served as chief data science officer of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has also served as founder and director of the Workflows for Data Science Center of Excellence (WorDS) since 2014, as well as founder and director of the WIFIRE lab. Altintas is also the co-initiator of the Kepler scientific workflow system, an open-source platform that endows research scientists with the ability to readily collaborate, share, and design scientific workflows.
Torsten Hoefler is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and the Chief Architect for Machine Learning at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Previously, he led the Advanced Application and User Support team at the Blue Waters Directorate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and held an adjunct professor position at the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. His expertise lies in large-scale parallel computing and high-performance computing systems. He focuses on applications in large-scale artificial intelligence as well as climate sciences.
