Jack Dongarra is my student, colleague and friend.

Contents

Turing Award

The ACM Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association% for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in the field of computer science and is often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing".

Jack Dongarra won the Turing Award in 2021. Here is his award lecture, a very personal story. https://amturing.acm.org/vp/dongarra_3406337.cfm

Jack

https://www.henkvandervorst.nl/computing.html

Linocut by Henk van der Vorst.

I first met Jack at Argonne in 1970 when we began work on the EISPACK project.

In 1979, he came to the University of New Mexico to work on a Ph.D. degree under my supervision. His thesis is "Improving the Accuracy of Computed Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors".

PC-AT

Jack and the IBM PC-AT in 1984.

Jack has been the primary implementor or principal investigator for many libraries including LINPACK, BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, PLASMA, MAGMA, and SLATE.

Argonne

The LINPACK Guys.

The authors of LINPACK -- Jack Dongarra, Cleve Moler, Pete Stewart and Jim Bunch -- at James Lyness's house near Argonne in the summer of 1978.

The first snapshot was in the New York Times when Jack won the Turing Award.

New Mexico

The 1978 New Mexico plate on Jack's Car in the NYT photo is gold. Jack had two 1979 turquoise plates made. He has one of them and he gave the other to me.

Accidental Benchmark

The LINPACK benchmark is an accidental offspring of the development of the LINPACK software package. We asked two dozen universities and laboratories to test the software on a variety of main frame machines that were then available in central computer centers. We also asked them to measure the time required to solve a 100-by-100 system of simultaneous linear equations.

Appendix B of the LINPACK Users' Guide has the timing results. The hand-written notes shown here are Jack's calculation of the megaflop rate, millions of floating point operations per second. With a matrix of order n , the megaflop rate for a factorization by Gaussian elimination plus two triangular solves is

megaflops = (2/3*n^3 + 2*n^2)/time/10^6

Jack and colleagues have continued to collect results. Twice a year, the TOP500 determines the world's fastest computer.

Spokesman

Jack has become a spokeman for high performance computing. He is often quoted by main-stream media.

SC Conference

Jack has been very active in the Super Computer Conferences. SC22 gave him a rousing local-kid-makes-good welcome after he won the Turing Award.

ICL

Jack established the Innovative Computing Laboratory in 1989 when he accepted a dual appointment as a Distinguished Professor at the University of Tennessee and a Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Since then, ICL has grown into an internationally recognized research laboratory, specializing in Numerical Linear Algebra, Distributed Computing, and Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking. The lab now employs nearly twenty researchers, students, and staff.

Tradition

John Gilbert, Jack, me and Rob Shriber traditionally meet for dinner once a year at the Super Computer conference. This photo was at SC18 in Dallas.

Get the MATLAB code

Published with MATLAB® R2024b