Dr. Satoshi Matsuoka
HPC luminary Dr. Satoshi Matsuoka of the Japan’s RIKEN Center for Computational Science has been named recipient of the 2022 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award. It’s a measure of his standing in the industry that in conversation, Dr. Matsuoka is typically referred to simply as “Satoshi,” and everyone knows who you’re talking about. This past May, the @HPCpodcast was pleased to have him as our guest (“@HPCpodcast: Satoshi Matsuoka on the TOP500, Fugaku and Arm, Quantum and Winning Japan’s Purple Ribbon Medal of Honor“), during which he was his usual erudite and informative self. Below is an excerpt from IEEE’s award announcement:
Dr. Matsuoka is being recognized for “long-term global leadership in supercomputing system design, such as TSUBAME and Fugaku.”
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.
Jack Dongarra, 2020 Women of ENAIC Computer Pioneer Award and winner of the 2021 Turing Award, noted that “Satoshi Matsuoka has made significant technical contributions to HPC and has contributed to nearly every leading-edge Japanese supercomputer for the last two decades. The commitment of Satoshi Matsuoka to advancing the scientific computing field is soundly established in his research, positions, and publications, as well as the contributions he has made in service to the scientific community.”
Many of the technological basis of modern exascale supercomputers and large AI clusters in the Cloud has origins in the R&D that Matsuoka had conducted over the years. For technical elements such as commodity scaling, grid/cloud resilience, green/low power, massive big data, as well as large scale AI training, Matsuoka has led basic research projects that tackled the issues with innovative solutions, as evidenced by numerous publications on the issues in top conferences and journals. He went on to design and construct experimental production machines to field test the results on real applications, and based on the results, would design multiple leadership-class supercomputers such as the TSUBAME series of supercomputers. These supercomputers would excel in the rankings and become a ‘template’ architecture for ensuing machines to replicate.
Since April 2018, Matsuoka has been the director of the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS), the top-tier national HPC center for Japan, developing and hosting Japan’s flagship ‘Fugaku’ supercomputer which has become the fastest supercomputer in the world in all four major supercomputer rankings in 2020 and 2021 (Top500, HPCG, HPL-AI, Graph500), along with multitudes of ongoing cutting edge HPC research being conducted, including investigating Post-Moore era computing.
He has been a Specially Appointed Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2018 along with his directorship at R-CCS. He was the leader of the TSUBAME series of supercomputers that had also received many international acclaims, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he still holds a professor position, to continue his research activities in HPC as well as scalable Big Data and AI, in both institutions.
His commendations include the Fellow positions in societies/conferences ACM, ISC, and the JSSST; the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2011 & 2021 and the IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award in 2014, all being one of the highest awards in the field of HPC; the Technical Papers Chair and the Program Chair for ACM/IEEE SC09 and SC13 conferences respectively as well as many other conference chairs, and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize selection committee chair in 2018. He received the Medal of Honor with Purple ribbon by the Japanese government in 2022.
Matsuoka received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Information Science from The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
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, Mateo Valero and David Kirk.
The 2022 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award will be presented to Dr. Matsuoka at the SC22 conference opening session in Dallas, Texas on Tuesday morning, 19 November 2022. He will also present an invited talk during the plenary session scheduled from 8:30 – 10:00am on Wednesday, 16 November.
For more information about IEEE Computer Society awards, visit www.computer.org/awards.
