Knoxville Researcher Wins A.M. Turing Award

schwit1 writes: It's a few weeks old, but...A local computer scientist and professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville has been named an A.M. Turing Award winner by the Association for Computing Machinery. The Turing Award is often referred to as the 'Nobel Prize of computer science.' It carries a million dollar prize.

'Oh, it was a complete shock. I'm still recovering from it,' Jack Dongarra told Knox News with a warm laugh. 'It's nice to see the work being recognized in this way but it couldn't have happened without the support and contribution of many people over time.' Chances are Dongarra's work has touched your life, even if you don't know it. If you've ever used a speech recognition program or looked at a weather forecast, you're using technology that relies on Dongarra's software libraries. Dongarra has held a joint appointment at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory since 1989. While he doesn't have a household name, his foundational work in computer science has undergirded the development of high-performance computers over the course of his 40-year career...

Dongarra developed software to allow computers to use multiple processors simultaneously, and this is basically how all computer systems work today. Your laptop has multiple processing cores and might have an additional graphics processing core. Many phones have multiple processing cores. 'He's continually rethought how to exploit today's computer architectures and done so very effectively,' said Nicholas Higham a Royal Society research professor of applied mathematics at the University of Manchester. 'He's come up with ideas so that we can get the very best out of these machines.' Dongarra also developed software that allowed computers with different hardware and operating systems to run in parallel, networking distant machines as a single computation device. This lets people make more powerful computers out of many smaller devices which helped develop cloud computing, running high-end applications over the internet. Most of Dongarra's work was published open-source through a project called Netlib.
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