Turing Award recipient to attend Big Data Expo 2023

Jack Joseph Dongarra, recipient of 2021 Turing Award, will deliver a speech at Big Data Expo 2023. [Photo/Shujyuguan]

Jack Joseph Dongarra, an American recipient of the 2021 Turing Award, recently confirmed his online attendance to the China International Big Data Industry Expo 2023 (Big Data Expo 2023), which will take place from May 26 to 28 in Guiyang, capital of Southwest China's Guizhou province.

According to the Expo Executive Committee, Dongarra will deliver a keynote speech on high-performance computing and big data at the opening ceremony of the expo.

Dongarra, born on July 18, 1950, is one of the founders of the Top500 project, which ranks and details the top 500 supercomputers. He has been a distinguished professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Tennessee since 1989.

He is also an outstanding researcher at the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 2007, Dongarra became a Turing Fellow at the University of Manchester's School of Mathematics in the United Kingdom, working to advance the development of batch computing, mixed-precision computing, and PLASMA software.

Dongarra is a pioneer in supercomputer benchmark testing, numerical analysis, linear algebra solvers, and high-performance computing. According to the website of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Dongarra's contribution to efficient numerical algorithms for linear algebra operations, parallel computing programming mechanisms, and performance evaluation tools has led the way in high-performance computing.

His main contribution to high-performance computing was the creation of open-source software libraries and standards that use linear algebra as an intermediate language and are available for various applications. They have enabled high-performance computing software to keep up with exponential hardware updates over the past 40 years.

In recognition of his groundbreaking concepts and methods in high-performance computing, Dongarra was awarded the 2021 Turing Award by the ACM in March 2022. The award is considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing."

In 2016, Dongarra did an interview with CCTV in which he expressed his understanding of the development of the supercomputing industry, his desire for talent cultivation, and his affirmation of China's supercomputing development.

Regarding his invitation to attend the Big Data Expo 2023, Dongarra stated that he would present a content-rich and exciting speech based on his research field.