[HN Gopher] Jack Dongarra wins Turing Award
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Jack Dongarra wins Turing Award
Author : ketanmaheshwari
Score : 259 points
Date : 2022-03-30 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (amturing.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (amturing.acm.org)
| jpgvm wrote:
| Well deserved Dr Dongarra. BLAS, LINPACK, so much amazing
| software and insights over the years.
| flakiness wrote:
| Just came here to leave a Google Scholar Link listing hist work:
| https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=X4SbSTAAAAAJ&hl=en...
|
| Enjoy, and congratulations!
| [deleted]
| _1 wrote:
| He hadn't already?
| [deleted]
| fthd wrote:
| well deserved, amazing it took so long
| linksnapzz wrote:
| Well deserved, and congratulations!!
| eslaught wrote:
| Is this the first Turing Award in HPC?
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| Leslie Lamport's contributions could be argued to have some
| impact on HPC.
| nudpiedo wrote:
| > Dongarra led the field in persuading hardware vendors to
| optimize these methods, and software developers to target his
| open-source libraries in their work
|
| I've got the gut feeling that this work might be 90% harder and
| longer than the whole math.
|
| Also wondering how much work was indeed made within a team rather
| than particular contributions.
| auggierose wrote:
| I guess living a reasonably long life is one of the prerequisites
| of getting a Turing Award.
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| While this seems generally true, Don Knuth was 37 when he won.
| pridkett wrote:
| The field has gotten much much bigger since then. There were
| so many foundational contributions to the field of computer
| science that we're still recognizing them today. There are
| subfields within subfields of computer science that attract
| as many researchers as were in all of computer science fifty
| years ago (think about some of the ML subfields like graph
| neural networks or style transfer for great examples of
| this).
|
| This means that new researchers not only have a lot more to
| learn (and also bigger shoulders to stand on), but also that
| it's a lot harder to make your research generally applicable
| across enough of the breadth of computer science.
|
| That's not to say that the work that Knuth performed wasn't
| worthy of the Turing award, but we're in a world now where
| you could easily be 37 and only recently have been awarded
| tenure (if you're even lucky enough for that), making him an
| outstanding exception.
| biofox wrote:
| (1) Do ground-breaking work in your 20s or 30s; (2) spend 30 or
| 40 years promoting it; (3) win!
| downut wrote:
| I think LAPACK and later work were much more important than
| his work in the 80s. But those were intensely collaborative
| and required enormous amounts of collective work. Well
| deserving of the Turing, but how can it be attributed to one
| person?
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| For a sec there I thought the Turing test was passed...
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| I'll bet Jack Dongarra could pass the Turing Test as well! What
| can't he do?
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Well there is a prize for passing the test. I know, pretty
| naive of me.
| tialaramex wrote:
| I mean, the prize for passing the actual practical test is
| now you're a person.
|
| I like being a person, but seems like some people I know
| don't so much, so maybe whether this is a good prize is a
| matter of opinion.
|
| But yes people have offered prizes for numerous toy
| protocols similar to Alan Turing's "parlour game" idea,
| many Cognitive Scientists doubt this is an effective
| protocol for testing personhood, not all of them in ways I
| agree with (e.g. Professor Harnad and I disagree vehemently
| about whether his big-T test is necessary) but clearly at
| some level "passing" as a person is satisfactory because
| that's all everybody else is doing.
| typon wrote:
| This man is indirectly responsible for Python becoming the
| lingua-franca of data science. Without Scipy/numpy wrapping his
| libraries, Python would not have achieved the success it has
| today.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I'm not so sure that the underlying libraries has much to do
| with it compared to the well designed interfaces of Scipy/Numpy
| and Python's expressive syntax / batteries-included standard
| library.
| typon wrote:
| It's a two-way street. 100% agree that python lent itself to
| being a great wrapper language - but there has to be
| something valuable to wrap for python to be useful.
| username223 wrote:
| Actually, all of the scripting languages developed packed
| arrays and BLAS bindings around the same time -- Python with
| numpy, Ruby with narray, Perl with PDL, and I think Common Lisp
| and some of the Schemes did, too. Python won that race for
| other reasons, I think mostly because its syntax looked pretty.
| pletnes wrote:
| I visited Tennessee once, walked by a bar and saw a sign saying
| <<Jack lives here>>. Fun story.
|
| Also, well deserved. I still recall the one talk by Jack Dongarra
| I ever saw. He threw out there that the iPad 2 had (at the time)
| the highest performance-per-watt CPU in the world. I've waited
| for the <<apple M1 moment>> since then - and now, suddenly...
| fantastic talk covering the whole HPC topic!
| kleebeesh wrote:
| Sadly he's not some kind of local hero. The area much prefers
| sports to academics. I studied CS there for undergrad and knew
| of him but rarely heard his name mentioned or celebrated.
| Zababa wrote:
| That's the first time I hear his name. For people in the same
| situation as me, from the article:
|
| > For over four decades, Dongarra has been the primary
| implementor or principal investigator for many libraries such as
| LINPACK, BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, PLASMA, MAGMA, and SLATE.
|
| Thank you for your work and congratulations!
| chubot wrote:
| Ever since I started using R and Pandas/NumPy, I always wondered
| who wrote and maintained all those linear algebra libraries.
| Embarrassingly I didn't know until now.
|
| Very well deserved!
| jhgb wrote:
| There's a very good chance that you're actually using third-
| party modern high-performance reimplementations of these
| libraries, like MKL or OpenBLAS. The original Netlib libraries
| are often a compatibility fallback. For example the Windows
| installer of Octave asks you which one you want to use.
| W-Stool wrote:
| There is no way to overestimate the impact of Dr. Dongarra and
| LINPACK. If you're active in the high performance computing world
| you know them both quite well. Well done Jack!
| donorman wrote:
| Linpack helped me solve an in general intractable problem 15
| years ago and kick-started my career short after I got my
| degree in CS, it turned out that the real world instances of
| the problem were indeed tractable but that was not revealed
| untill I tried Linpack. Needless to say I am very greatfull,
| and I am very happy to see Dongarra got this well earned
| reward.
| kragen wrote:
| Is this the first Turing Award for writing free software? As
| opposed to papers, I mean.
|
| (They did mention his papers, but it seems clear that the
| software was more important.)
| blt wrote:
| Leslie Lamport primarily won it for his work on distributed
| systems, but LaTeX is also mentioned.
|
| https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/lamport_1205376.cfm
| apengwin wrote:
| ritchie and thompson?
| kragen wrote:
| Unix wasn't free software (until recently), but it's true
| that the software was more important than the numerous papers
| and books about it.
| azhenley wrote:
| This makes me proud to have been faculty at University of
| Tennessee, even if I recently resigned :)
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Rilly? Why?
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| They blogged about it here:
| https://austinhenley.com/blog/leavingacademia.html
| mpfundstein wrote:
| bigbillheck wrote:
| The author's pronouns are not on their HN profile, on
| their twitter profile, or the article itself. As such,
| 'they' is perfectly cromulent.
| pragmatic8 wrote:
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