The Gordon Bell Prize, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize of Supercomputing, is an

award An award, sometimes called a distinction, is something given to a recipient as a token of recognition of excellence in a certain field. When the token is a medal, ribbon or other item designed for wearing, it is known as a decoration. An awar ...

presented by the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

each year in conjunction with the SC Conference series (formerly known as the

Supercomputing Conference SC (formerly Supercomputing), the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, is the annual conference established in 1988 by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society. In ...

). The prize recognizes outstanding achievement in

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...

applications. The main purpose is to track the progress over time of

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...

, by acknowledging and rewarding innovation in applying high-performance computing to applications in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics. The prize was established in 1987. A cash award of $10,000 (since 2011) accompanies the recognition, funded by

Gordon Bell Chester Gordon Bell (born August 19, 1934) is an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later became Vice President of Engi ...

, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing. The Prizes were preceded by a nominal prize ($100) established by Alan Karp, a

numerical analyst Numerical analysis is the study of algorithms that use numerical approximation (as opposed to symbolic manipulations) for the problems of mathematical analysis (as distinguished from discrete mathematics). It is the study of numerical methods ...

(then of IBM) who challenged claims of

MIMD In computing, multiple instruction, multiple data (MIMD) is a technique employed to achieve parallelism. Machines using MIMD have a number of processors that function asynchronously and independently. At any time, different processors may be exe ...

performance improvements proposed in the Letters to the Editor section of the

Communications of the ACM ''Communications of the ACM'' is the monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It was established in 1958, with Saul Rosen as its first managing editor. It is sent to all ACM members. Articles are intended for readers with ...

. Karp went on to be one of the first Gordon Bell Prize judges. Individuals or teams may apply for the award by submitting a technical paper describing their work through the SC conference submissions process. Finalists present their work at that year's conference, and their submissions are included in the conference proceedings.

Prize criteria

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize is primarily intended to recognize performance achievements that demonstrate: * evidence of important algorithmic and/or implementation innovations * clear improvement over the previous state-of-the-art * solutions that don’t depend on one-of-a-kind architectures (systems that can only be used to address a narrow range of problems, or that can’t be replicated by others) * performance measurements that have been characterized in terms of scalability (strong as well as weak scaling), time to solution, efficiency (in using bottleneck resources, such as memory size or bandwidth, communications bandwidth, I/O), and/or peak performance * achievements that are generalizable, in the sense that other people can learn and benefit from the innovations In earlier years, multiple prizes were sometimes awarded to reflect different types of achievements. According to current policies, the Prize can be awarded in one or more of the following categories, depending on the entries received in a given year:

Peak Performance Peak or The Peak may refer to: Basic meanings Geology * Mountain peak ** Pyramidal peak, a mountaintop that has been sculpted by erosion to form a point Mathematics * Peak hour or rush hour, in traffic congestion * Peak (geometry), an (''n''-3)-d ...

: If the entry demonstrates outstanding performance in terms of

floating point operations per second In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

on an important science/engineering problem; the efficiency of the application in using bottleneck resources (such as memory size or bandwidth) is also taken into consideration. Special Achievement in Scalability, Special Achievement in Time to Solution: If the entry demonstrates exceptional

Scalability Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...

, in terms of both strong and weak scaling, and/or total time to solve an important science/engineering problem.

References

External links

Gordon Bell Prize - Award Winners: List By YearGordon Bell Prize description from SC13ACM Gordon Bell Prize Winners 2006-present

Gordon Bell Prize official page on ACM WebsiteThe SC (formerly "Supercomputing") Conference Series
{{Association for Computing Machinery Association for Computing Machinery Computer science awards Awards established in 1987

Prize criteria

See also

References

External links