Jack Dongarra

Jack Dongarra is my pupil, colleague and buddy.

Contents

Turing Award

The ACM Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Affiliation% for Computing Equipment (ACM) for contributions of lasting and main technical significance to laptop science. It’s usually acknowledged as the very best distinction within the area of laptop science and is sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Computing”.

Jack Dongarra gained the Turing Award in 2021. Right here is his award lecture, a really private story. https://amturing.acm.org/vp/dongarra_3406337.cfm

Jack

https://www.henkvandervorst.nl/computing.html

Linocut by Henk van der Vorst.

I first met Jack at Argonne in 1970 once we started work on the EISPACK undertaking.

In 1979, he got here to the College of New Mexico to work on a Ph.D. diploma below my supervision. His thesis is “Enhancing the Accuracy of Computed Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors”.

PC-AT

Jack and the IBM PC-AT in 1984.

Jack has been the first implementor or principal investigator for a lot of libraries together with LINPACK, BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, PLASMA, MAGMA, and SLATE.

Argonne

The LINPACK Guys.

The authors of LINPACK — Jack Dongarra, Cleve Moler, Pete Stewart and Jim Bunch — at James Lyness’s home close to Argonne in the summertime of 1978.

The primary snapshot was within the New York Instances when Jack gained the Turing Award.

New Mexico

The 1978 New Mexico plate on Jack’s Automotive within the NYT photograph is gold. Jack had two 1979 turquoise plates made. He has considered one of them and he gave the opposite to me.

Unintended Benchmark

The LINPACK benchmark is an unintended offspring of the event of the LINPACK software program package deal. We requested two dozen universities and laboratories to check the software program on quite a lot of most important body machines that had been then accessible in central laptop facilities. We additionally requested them to measure the time required to unravel a 100-by-100 system of simultaneous linear equations.

Appendix B of the LINPACK Customers’ Information has the timing outcomes. The hand-written notes proven listed below are Jack’s calculation of the megaflop fee, hundreds of thousands of floating level operations per second. With a matrix of order n , the megaflop fee for a factorization by Gaussian elimination plus two triangular solves is

megaflops = (2/3*n^3 + 2*n^2)/time/10^6

Jack and colleagues have continued to gather outcomes. Twice a 12 months, the TOP500 determines the world’s quickest laptop.

Spokesman

Jack has develop into a spokeman for top efficiency computing. He’s usually quoted by main-stream media.

SC Convention

Jack has been very lively within the Tremendous Laptop Conferences. SC22 gave him a rousing local-kid-makes-good welcome after he gained the Turing Award.

ICL

Jack established the Progressive Computing Laboratory in 1989 when he accepted a twin appointment as a Distinguished Professor on the College of Tennessee and a Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory. Since then, ICL has grown into an internationally acknowledged analysis laboratory, specializing in Numerical Linear Algebra, Distributed Computing, and Efficiency Analysis and Benchmarking. The lab now employs practically twenty researchers, college students, and workers.

Custom

John Gilbert, Jack, me and Rob Shriber historically meet for dinner yearly on the Tremendous Laptop convention. This photograph was at SC18 in Dallas.

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