Two Researchers to Share 2024 Jack Dongarra Early Career HPC Award at ISC

Two early career researchers, Edgar Solomonik of the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign and Amanda Randles of Duke University, have been selected as the recipients of the Jack Dongarra Early Career Award, to be presented at ISC 2024. The award committee acknowledged their exceptional work and dedication and decided to present the award to both researchers as a special case. Each recipient will receive €2,500 euros as part of the award.

The award ceremony will take place in Hamburg, Germany, on Monday, May 13, and will be followed by a Lecture Series delivered by both winners.

The first award recipient is Amanda Randles, an Associate Professor in Biomedical Sciences at Duke University’s Biomedical Engineering Department. Randles holds a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard with a secondary field in computational science, in which she is renowned for her expertise. She has created a circulatory modeling code called HARVEY, which is used for blood flow simulation. The code uses different forms of parallelism to achieve high performance across a wide range of architectures. Her research has made significant progress in the use of HPC in biomedical fields, especially in patient-specific blood flow modeling.

Randles’ work enables the creation of personalized digital twins of the human cardiac system, which can be used to predict and prevent life-threatening health problems. Collaborating with an interdisciplinary team, she has developed new methods for simulations of blood flow that span multiple scales, ranging from the cellular level to systemic levels. She has significantly advanced the capabilities of computational medicine, both spatially and temporally.

In her recent work, she has introduced innovative methods to generate digital twins from wearables-derived data, which extends the capabilities of 3D simulations from several heartbeats to weeks of continuous data. She has developed new methods for capturing cellular interactions across length scales, ranging from centimeters to meters, using the adaptive physics refinement framework.

Randles currently holds 116 US patents in the field of parallel computing.

The second award recipient is Edgar Solomonik, an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The award committee commended him for his impressive theoretical skills and contributions to linear algebra. He was nominated for his unique combination of theory and practice, which promises to lead to new solutions to long-standing problems.

Solomonik has authored several research papers, and his work is well-respected by experts in the field of linear algebra. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and is known for his research on developing algorithms for efficient numerical tensor algebra. He completed his undergraduate studies in just two years, earning him the Best Undergraduate Research Project Award from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Solomonik has also received a number of other prestigious awards, including the National Science Foundation Career Award, the SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing Early Career Prize, and the IEEE TCHPC Early Career Researchers Excellence Award in High Performance Computing. The Jack Dongarra Award will further add to his impressive list of accomplishments.