Keyes Wins Fernbach Award

Aug 01 2007
David Keyes, the Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics, received the IEEE Computer Society’s 2007 Sidney Fernbach Award at the November Supercomputing ’07 Conference in Reno, NV. The award is given annually to an individual for an outstanding contribution in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches. Keyes’ citation reads: “for outstanding contributions to the development of scalable numerical algorithms for the solution of nonlinear partial differential equations and exceptional leadership in high-performance computation.

Keyes has pushed simulations of fluid dynamics, combustion, radiation transport, and magnetohydrodynamics onto parallel computers from the first commercially available systems in 1985 to IBM’s currently world-leading BlueGene systems, concentrating on the scalability of solution algorithms as the number of processors heads towards the millions. For one such effort in computational aerodynamics, Keyes shared the ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize at Supercomputing ’99.

He has led NSF-, NASA-, and DOE-sponsored teams in the prototyping of research software and the maintenance of freely available libraries. He currently directs the DOE SciDAC software project “Towards Optimal Petascale Simulations” (TOPS), and the international scientific organization “ddm.org” which promotes the development and analysis of algorithms for solving differential equations on distributed-memory parallel computers. For the past eight years, Keyes has directed the Institute for Scientific Computing Research, an academic outreach center operated by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He is also the Vice President-at-Large of SIAM, and has edited several federal agency reports on large-scale scientific simulation.

The Sidney Fernbach Award has been made nearly annually since 1993 to a computational scientist whose contributions range from the math- ematics of simulation, to computer architecture and software issues, to the physical applications, themselves. Keyes is the 14th recipient. Previous recipients include Profs. Marsha Berger and Charles Peskin of the Courant Institute at NYU. Sidney Fernbach directed some of the Department of Energy’s most significant efforts in scientific computing from the establishment of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1952 through 1982. The award was established following his death in 1991.

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