Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. My name is Guillaume Serries and today I explain to you who is Jack Dongarra, Turing Prize 2021, the man who imposed supercomputers.
In the world of innovation, you know Elon Musk and Bill Gates. But not Jack Dongarra. And it is inexcusable. So I’ll fix that.
Between two worlds
Much of Jack Dongarra’s life has been spent shuttling between two worlds.
In one, Jack sits down with a group of mathematicians, pen and paper in hand, and imagines problems that could be solved by computers. Finally, by very very large computers, the size of a cupboard, or even several.
And in another world, he is faced with these colossi of integrated circuits, installed in clean rooms, and endowed with incredible computing power. And he tries to configure them taking into account incredible constraints, such as speed, memory, energy, and of course the cost of these gigantic machines.
Yes, Jack Dongarra has spent 50 years bringing these worlds together.
Turing Award
That’s why this career was celebrated last week by the Association for Computing Machinery, which presented Jack Dongarra with its highest honour, the Turing Award. Yes, it’s the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for the computer industry.
Google, which sponsors this award, will give him a million dollar reward.
And no, Jack Dongarra is not already a millionaire. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee, in the United States. He holds a doctorate in applied mathematics.
LINPACK, BLAS and MAGMA
But what could Jack Dongarra have done to deserve this award, and a million dollars?
Well, he created tools like LINPACK, widely used to evaluate system performance. He also created BLAS, an indispensable tool for performing the vector and matrix operations necessary for scientific computing. Or again, he set up MAGMA, a linear algebra library that runs the graphics cards embedded in supercomputers.
To sum up, the tools of this professor make it possible to design powerful software running on high-performance machines.
He also worked on parallel processing mechanisms, and finally, and this is perhaps the best known of these works, he developed performance evaluation techniques to measure the execution speed of these supercomputers. . Enough to draw up the famous TOP500 list of supercomputers.
To date, it is the Japanese supercomputer Fugaku, developed by Fujitsu, which has been the most powerful in the world since June 2020, and therefore at the top of the TOP500. And it uses a Red Hat Linux 8 operating system to run.
“Science is guided by simulation”, assures Jack Dongarra. “It is in this balance between the capabilities of the hardware and the need for simulations to use this hardware that my software finds its place. »