Geoffrey C. Fox of Indiana University Bloomington
Today ACM/IEEE named Geoffrey C. Fox of Indiana University Bloomington as the recipient of the 2019 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award.
Fox was cited for foundational contributions to parallel computing methodology, algorithms and software, and data analysis, and their interfaces with broad classes of applications. The award will be presented at SC19 in Denver.
Through a long and distinguished career, Fox has made several important technical contributions to high performance computing. Fox identified the principles behind the use of decomposition and efficient message passing in early MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data) hypercubes., which pioneered application development on parallel machines. In several well-received papers, Fox demonstrated the synergies between Message Passing Interface (MPI) and MapReduce. In one paper, for instance, he introduced the programming model and architecture of Twister, an enhanced map-reduce runtime that supports iterative MapReduce computations efficiently. His more recent Twister 2 system systematically provides HPC performance with functionalities similar to Apache Spark, Flink, Storm, and Heron. His recent work at the interface of HPC and data-intensive computing has resulted in the SPIDAL (Scalable Parallel and Interoperable Data-intensive Application Library) project.SPIDAL supports a very diverse collection of data-intensive applications on high performance computing platforms.
Fox’s service to the community includes involvement with several organizations, including the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education which identifies research opportunities in computing for the students and staff of minority serving institutions (MSIs). Since 1997, he has also taught Java and parallel computing courses across the internet to historically black colleges and universities and MSIs. Fox’s MOOC (massive online open course), “Big Data Applications,” was cited by Computerworld as one of the “7 Great MOOCs for Techies,” and he has made important contributions to computing standards through leadership roles with the Open Grid Forum and the Java Grande Forum.
The Ken Kennedy Award was established in 2009 to recognize substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and significant community service or mentoring contributions. It was named for the late Ken Kennedy, founder of Rice University’s computer science program and a world expert on high performance computing. The Kennedy Award carries a $5,000 honorarium endowed by the SC Conference Steering Committee.
Registration is now open for SC19, which takes place Nov 17-22 in Denver.
