CONNECTING THE DOTS

JACK DONGARRA EARLY CAREER

AWARD

Award Ceremony & Lecture Series
June 10, 2025

JACK DONGARRA EARLY CAREER AWARD

The ISC High Performance Jack Dongarra Early Career Award and Lecture Series is an annual event that honors the remarkable contributions of Professor Jack Dongarra to the field of high performance computing and the HPC community. This series became a part of the ISC conference series starting in 2023.

The award is intended for an up-and-coming researcher who has been a catalyst for scientific progress in their field. The researcher should have between 4-10 years of experience after completing their PhD.* (refer to the Nomination & Selection Process section for further details.)

The award focuses on outstanding individuals who have made exceptional contributions to high-performance computing, including numerical algorithms and software libraries, computational sciences, mathematics, and machine learning.

The award includes a certificate of recognition and a cash prize of 5,000 Euros.

FEB 26, 2025

Nomination Deadline

mid of april

End of Selection Process

End of April

Award Winner Announcement

Jun 10, 2025

Award Ceremony & Winner's Lecture Series

The award is intended for an up-and-coming researcher who has been a catalyst for scientific progress in their field. The researcher should have between 4-10 years of experience after completing their PhD.* (refer to the Nomination & Selection Process section for further details.)

The award focuses on outstanding individuals who have made exceptional contributions to high-performance computing, including numerical algorithms and software libraries, computational sciences, mathematics, and machine learning.

The award includes a certificate of recognition and a cash prize of 5,000 Euros.

THE AWARD INCLUDES A CERTIFICATE OF RECOGNITION AND A CASH PRIZE OF 5,000 EUROS

DIVERSITY & INCLUSION

We welcome nominations of researchers who meet the requirements regardless of gender, nationality, ethnicity, social origin, disability, sexual orientation, etc.

advice

A nomination is a report explaining why a candidate is worthy of receiving an award. The success of a nomination depends first and foremost on the quality of the candidate, but this must be adequately reflected in the description and, where appropriate, in the endorsements. Decisions about candidates are made almost exclusively on the basis of the information contained in the nomination and endorsements, which is why the quality of these documents is of crucial importance.

 

nomination & selection process

  • A nominator proposes a candidate for the award via a Linklings form.
  • The researcher should have between 4-10 years of experience after completing their PhD.*
  • The nominator nor the nominee is allowed to nominate themselves.
  • Committee members are not allowed to nominate candidates but can encourage nominations.
  • Past honorable mentions can be nominated again as long as they are still eligible.

The selection process will be subject to the scrutiny of an international committee headed by Prof Michela Taufer, who co-incidentally holds the Jack Dongarra Professorship in HPC within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA.

*ISC recognizes the difficulties that families and individuals encounter in their professional journeys. We are open to the possibility of extending the eligibility period by as much as four years for individuals who have become parents, served as primary caregivers, or faced substantial personal challenges following their graduation. Nominees are requested to furnish the graduation date to the nominator and the rationale for seeking an extension beyond the typical 4-10 year post-PhD timeframe in their nomination.

award committee

publication

The award winner’s lecture will be published in the International Journal of High Performance Computer Applications.

PAST WINNERS

ISC 2024 Award Recipients

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.

 

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 excellent 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.

ISC 2023 Award Recipient

Torsten Hoefler, a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, a member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE. The Jack Dongarra Early Career Award acknowledges his significant contributions to converging high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). His research focuses on performance-centric system design, which includes scalable networks, parallel programming techniques, and performance modeling for large-scale simulations and AI systems.

Torsten won best paper awards at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference SC10, SC13, SC14, SC19, SC22, EuroMPI’13, HPDC’15, HPDC’16, IPDPS’15, and other conferences. He published numerous peer-reviewed scientific conference and journal articles and authored chapters of the MPI-2.2 and MPI-3.0 standards. He received the IEEE CS Sidney Fernbach Award, the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, the Latsis prize of ETH Zurich, as well as both ERC starting and consolidator grants. He recently received the Max Planck-Humboldt medal of Germany.

Contact

MS. TANJA GRÜNTER

Conference Program Manager