SC18 has named Mike Warren and John Salmon Test of Time Award (ToTA) winners for their 1993-published paper, “A Parallel Hashed Oct-Tree N-Body Algorithm.”
RCC Director Prof. David Abramson is the ToTA Committee Chair.
“The award-winning paper describes a technique for solving N-body problems, which arise in a large number of fields from astrophysics to chemistry at both large and small scales,” said Prof. Abramson. “Importantly, it described novel algorithms that served as an efficient way of solving N-body problems on HPC platforms.”
The ToTA, awarded annually, recognises an outstanding paper, selected from the Supercomputing Conference (SC) proceedings of 10–25 years ago, that has deeply influenced the high-performance computing (HPC) field. It is a mark of historical impact and recognition that the paper has changed HPC trends.
According to Prof. Abramson, the techniques published in Dr Warren and Dr Salmon’s paper were ground-breaking, and the analysis was robust. “The paper has been and continues to be heavily cited; even though the experimental work was performed on a 512-processor machine, the work is just as relevant to today’s supercomputers with hundreds of thousands of cores. For all these reasons, the committee was keen to select this paper and hold it up as an exemplar for future submissions,” he said.
Dr Warren leads the technical team at Descartes Labs in the USA. His work spans a wide range of disciplines, with the recurring theme of developing and applying advanced software and computing technology to understand the physical and virtual world. His work has been recognised on multiple occasions, including the Gordon Bell prize for outstanding achievement in HPC.
Dr Salmon is currently a scientist at D.E. Shaw Research in New York City where he works on special purpose computers, algorithms, software and hardware for biochemical molecular dynamics simulations. He has won (with colleagues) several Gordon Bell prizes and SC best paper awards.
(This article is an edited version of a piece published in SC Insider on 27 June 2018.)
