IBM’s Alan Gara to Accept Seymour Cray Award at SC10

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At SC10, Dr. Alan Gara of IBM will receive the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award “For innovations in low power, densely packaged supercomputing systems.” Dr. Gara is the chief system architect of the three generations of BlueGene supercomputers. He is also an IBM Fellow at the T.J. Watson Research Center and is now leading exascale system research in IBM.

Alan Gara received his PhD in physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1987. Dr. Gara has received two Gordon Bell awards in each of 1998 and 2006 for his scientific work in supercomputing. The Blue Gene supercomputer received a national medal of technology and innovation in 2009. He joined IBM Research in 1999.

Dr. Gara joins the ranks of these past recipients of the Seymour Cray Award:

  • Kenichi Miura, 2009. For his “ingenuity in developing supercomputer software and hardware that advanced the state-of-the art in technical computing.”
  • Steve Wallach, 2008. For his “contribution to high-performance computing through design of innovative vector and parallel computing systems, notably the Convex mini-supercomputer series, a distinguished industrial career and acts of public service.”
  • Ken Batcher, 2007. “For fundamental theoretical and practical contributions to massively parallel computation, including parallel sorting algorithms, interconnection networks, and pioneering designs of the STARAN and MPP computers.”
  • Tadashi Watanabe, 2006. “For serving as lead designer of the NEC SX series of supercomputers, and especially for the design of the Earth Simulator, which was the world’s fastest supercomputer from 2002 to 2004.”
  • Steven L. Scott, 2005. “For advancing supercomputer architecture through the development of the Cray T3E, the Cray X1 and the Cray Black Widow”.
  • William J. Dally, 2004. “For fundamental contributions to the design and engineering of high-performance interconnection networks,parallel computer architectures, and high-speed signaling technology.”
  • Burton J. Smith, 2003. “For ingenious and sustained contributions to designs and implementations at the frontier of high performance computing and especially for sustained championing of the use of multithreading to enable parallel execution and overcome latency and to achieve high performance in industrially significant products.”
  • Monty Denneau, 2002. “For ingenious and sustained contributions to designs and implementations at the frontier of high performance computing leading to widely used industrial products.”
  • John L. Hennessy, 2001. “For pioneering contributions to the foundation, teaching, and practice of high performance computing, especially in distributed shared memory multiprocessor architectures and in design and application of reduced instruction set architectures.”
  • Glen J. Culler. 2000. “For pioneering contributions to the foundation and practice of high performance computing in array and very long instruction word (VLIW) processing especially for use in interactive scientific exploration.”
  • John Cocke, 1999. “For unique and creative contributions to the computer industry through innovative high performance system designs.”