Seymour Roger 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. Joel S. Birnbaum, then chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard, said of him: "It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them." Larry Smarr, then director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois said that Cray is "the Thomas Edison of the supercomputing industry."
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, there are supercomputers which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS).
John Cocke was an American computer scientist recognized for his large contribution to computer architecture and optimizing compiler design. He is considered by many to be "the father of RISC architecture."
Jack Joseph Dongarra is an American computer scientist. 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 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.
ASCI Red was the first computer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), the supercomputing initiative of the United States government created to help the maintenance of the United States nuclear arsenal after the 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing.
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. Bader has served on the Computing Research Association's Board of Directors, the National Science Foundation's Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, and on the IEEE Computer Society's Board of Governors. He is an expert in the design and analysis of parallel and multicore algorithms for real-world applications such as those in cybersecurity and computational biology. His main areas of research are at the intersection of high-performance computing and real-world applications, including cybersecurity, massive-scale analytics, and computational genomics. Bader built the first Linux supercomputer using commodity processors and a high-speed interconnection network.
NEC SX describes a series of vector supercomputers designed, manufactured, and marketed by NEC. This computer series is notable for providing the first computer to exceed 1 gigaflop, as well as the fastest supercomputer in the world between 1992–1993, and 2002–2004. The current model, as of 2018, is the SX-Aurora TSUBASA.
Scalable POWERparallel (SP) is a series of supercomputers from IBM. SP systems were part of the IBM RISC System/6000 (RS/6000) family, and were also called the RS/6000 SP. The first model, the SP1, was introduced in February 1993, and new models were introduced throughout the 1990s until the RS/6000 was succeeded by eServer pSeries in October 2000. The SP is a distributed memory system, consisting of multiple RS/6000-based nodes interconnected by an IBM-proprietary switch called the High Performance Switch (HPS). The nodes are clustered using software called PSSP, which is mainly written in Perl.
The Eckert–Mauchly Award recognizes contributions to digital systems and computer architecture. It is known as the computer architecture community’s most prestigious award. First awarded in 1979, it was named for John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, who between 1943 and 1946 collaborated on the design and construction of the first large scale electronic computing machine, known as ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. A certificate and $5,000 are awarded jointly by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society for outstanding contributions to the field of computer and digital systems architecture.
William James Dally is an American computer scientist and educator.
Monty M. Denneau is a computer architect and mathematician. Denneau was awarded the 2002 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award for "ingenious and sustained contributions to designs and implementations at the frontier of high performance computing leading to widely used industrial products."
Marc Snir is an Israeli American computer scientist. He holds a Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professorship in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has a courtesy appointment in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He currently pursues research in parallel computing. He is principal investigator (PI) for the software of the petascale Blue Waters system and co-director of the Intel and Microsoft funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC).
Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1018 floating point operations per second (1 exaFLOPS). The terminology generally refers to the performance of supercomputer systems, with the Fugaku being the first supercomputer in history to hit this milestone (HPL-AI benchmark). In April 2020, the distributed computing network Folding@home attained one exaFLOPS of computing performance.
Mateo Valero Cortés is a Spanish computer architect. His research encompasses different concepts within the field of computer architecture, a discipline in which he has published more than 700 papers in journals, conference proceedings and books. Valero has received numerous awards, including the Eckert–Mauchly Award in 2007, for "extraordinary leadership in building a world class computer architecture research center, for seminal contributions in the areas of vector computing and multithreading, and for pioneering basic new approaches to instruction-level parallelism." He is the director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which hosts the MareNostrum supercomputer.
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. The not-for-profit conference is run by a committee of approximately 600 volunteers who spend roughly three years organizing each conference.
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.
The term supercomputing arose in the late 1920s in the United States in response to the IBM tabulators at Columbia University. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is sometimes considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1960 UNIVAC LARC, the IBM 7030 Stretch, and the Manchester Atlas, both in 1962—all of which were of comparable power; and the 1954 IBM NORC.
Guang R. Gao was a computer scientist and a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Delaware. Gao was a founder and Chief Scientist of ETI.
ACM SIGHPC is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing, an international community of students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners working on research and in professional practice related to supercomputing, high-end computers, and cluster computing. The organization co-sponsors international conferences related to high performance and scientific computing, including: SC, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis; the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) Conference; and PPoPP, the Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming.
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 2016, Vuduc serves as Vice President of the SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing. He has co-authored over 150 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.
