Geoffrey Fox
Geoffrey Fox, a distinguished professor at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, has been named the 2019 recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery IEEE Computer Society’s Ken Kennedy Award.
Fox was honored for foundational contributions to parallel computing methodology, algorithms and software, and data analysis, and their interfaces with broad classes of applications. He will receive the award during SC 19: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis to be held Nov. 17-22 in Denver.
“I’m proud to be recognized by my peers,” Fox said. “I am permanently reminded of my wonderful friendship and collaboration with Ken Kennedy.”
The ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award is awarded annually and recognizes substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing, and substantial community service or mentoring contributions.
“Through a long and distinguished career, Fox has made several important technical contributions to high performance computing,” the award committee said in a statement. “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. 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.”
The ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award was established in 2009 in honor of the late Ken Kennedy, the founder of Rice University’s computer science program and a world expert on high performance computing. The award carries a $5,000 honorarium, and Fox will give a presentation at an upcoming conference.
“Geoffrey Fox’s contributions to the field of parallel computing can’t be overstated,” said Raj Acharya, dean of the Luddy School. “The Ken Kennedy Award is a tremendous honor, and Geoffrey’s work only further solidifies our school’s reputation as a leader in supercomputing. Our faculty are world class, and Geoffrey is the kind of mentor who makes the Luddy School so special.”