Dr. William Camp, Director Emeritus at Sandia National Laboratories
This week, IEEE announced that Dr. William Camp, Director Emeritus at Sandia National Laboratories, has been named the recipient of the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award “for visionary leadership of the Red Storm project, and for decades of leadership of the HPC community.”
The Seymour Cray Computer Engineering award is one of the IEEE Computer Society’s highest awards, and is presented in recognition of innovative contributions to high-performance computing systems that best exemplify the creative spirit demonstrated by Seymour Cray. The award consists of a crystal memento, a certificate, and a $10,000 honorarium.
Dr. Camp has had a distinguished and prolific career of scientific and high performance leadership achievements in computational science and high performance computing spanning efforts as a user of computing, a leader of computational research, an advocate for computation as a major pillar of science and engineering, and for specific contributions to massively parallel computational methods and massively parallel hardware/software architectures.
A pinnacle achievement of Dr. Camp was his visionary leadership of the development of the Red Storm supercomputer. In 2000, Dr. Camp and his colleague, Jim Tomkins developed and patented the Red Storm architecture; and Dr. Camp led a partnership with Cray to build it. ASCI Red Storm became the Cray XT3 and the follow-on XT-series, which are arguably the most successful supercomputers to date.
In 2006, Dr. Camp joined Intel as Chief Supercomputing Architect and directed Intel’s Exascale R&D efforts. His team’s work led to detailed architectures and conceptual designs for Exascale. Bill also led Intel’s efforts to create joint Exascale labs with leading European computing centers. Bill received two Intel individual achievement awards recognizing those accomplishments.
Currently, Dr. Camp consults on computing technologies for post-Exascale computing.
Seymour Cray Award
Dr. Camp spent most of his career at NNSA’s Sandia Labs, at Cray Research and at Intel. At Sandia, he founded DOE’s Massively Parallel Computing Research Lab (MPCRL). In its first 5 years the MPCRL won the inaugural Gordon Bell Prize, several other international awards, and 8 R&D100 Awards– all for pioneering highly scalable applications, algorithms, and methods as well as for developing scalable systems software and hardware. The MPCRL received over 30 patents for MPP technologies.
While on leave at Cray, Dr. Camp led scalable applications development for the T3D and T3E computer systems and served on the T3E core design team.
Dr. Camp returned to Sandia to direct NNSA’s newly formed Accelerated Strategic computing Initiative (ASCI) and to direct Sandia’s Computing Information, and Math R&D, as well as contributing to MPP design and development. His team stood up a series of first-ever computing capabilities: First 1000+ PE MPP, first MPP to lead Top 500 list (Paragon), first tera-scale computer (ASCI RED), and first tera-scale cluster-based supercomputing environment (CPlant).
A National Merit Scholar at Manhattan College in EE/NE, Dr. Camp received his PhD at Cornell for work in theoretical and computational physics.
Previous Seymour Cray Award recipients include Gordon Bell, Ken Batcher, John Cocke, Glen Culler, William J. Dally, Monty Denneau, Alan Gara, John L. Hennessy, Peter Kogge, Kenichi Miura, Steven L. Scott, Charles Seitz, Burton J. Smith, Marc Snir, Steven Wallach, Tadashi Watanabe, and Mateo Valero.
The 2016 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award will be presented at the SC16 Conference awards plenary session in Salt Lake City, Utah, on 15 November 2016. Dr. Camp will also have the opportunity to present a special invited talk at a 16 November 2016 technical session.
See our complete coverage of SC16
