Torsten Hoefler of ETH Zurich
HAMBURG, April 17, 2023 – Professor Torsten Hoefler of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, has been named the inaugural Jack Dongarra Early Career Award recipient. This 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.
The Jack Dongarra Early Career Award is given to an early to mid-career researcher who has been a catalyst for scientific progress through exceptional work in areas including numerical algorithms and software libraries, computational sciences, mathematics, and machine learning. The award includes a monetary prize of 5,000 Euros sponsored by the ISC Group.
The award recipient was selected by an international committee headed by Professor Michela Taufer, the Jack Dongarra Professorship in HPC within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA. Dongarra will personally present the award to Hoefler at the ISC supercomputing conference in Hamburg after the opening ceremony on Monday, May 22, at 11:25 a.m. in Hall Z, followed by a 30-minute lecture by Hoefler. He will also take questions from the audience after his talk. The address will be published in the International Journal of High-Performance Computer Applications.
Starting in 2023, this award shall commemorate Professor Jack Dongarra’s lifelong contributions to the field of high performance computing and the community.
Hoefler is currently a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and leads the Scalable Parallel Computing Laboratory. Before joining ETH Zurich, he led the performance modeling and simulation efforts for the first petascale supercomputer, Blue Waters, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Hoefler is a prominent member of the HPC community and well-recognized for his field contributions. As a key contributor to the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard, he chaired the “Collective Operations and Topologies” working group. Among his many accolades, he won best paper awards at ACM/IEEE Supercomputing in 2010, 2013, 2014, and 2019 and at other international conferences. Torsten is also the recipient of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, the IEEE TCSC Award of Excellence (MCR), ETH Zurich’s Latsis Prize, the SIAM SIAG/Supercomputing Junior Scientist Prize, the IEEE TCSC Young Achievers in Scalable Computing Award, and the Bench Council Rising Star Award. After completing his Ph.D., he received the 2014 Young Alumni Award and the 2022 Distinguished Alumni Award at Indiana University. Torsten was elected to the first steering committee of ACM’s SIGHPC in 2013 and has been re-elected for every term since then.
