The Gordon Bell Prize is an
award
An award, sometimes called a distinction, is given to a recipient as a token of recognition of excellence in a certain field. When the token is a medal, ribbon or other item designed for wearing, it is known as a decoration.
An award may be d ...
presented by the
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...
each year in conjunction with the SC Conference series (formerly known as the
Supercomputing Conference). The prize recognizes outstanding achievement in
high-performance computing
High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.
Overview
HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...
applications. The main purpose is to track the progress over time of
parallel computing
Parallel computing is a type of computing, computation in which many calculations or Process (computing), processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. ...
, by acknowledging and rewarding innovation in applying high-performance computing to applications in science, engineering, and
large-scale data analytics. The prize was established in 1987. A cash award of $10,000 (since 2011) accompanies the recognition, funded by
Gordon Bell
Chester Gordon Bell (August 19, 1934 – May 17, 2024) was an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), from 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later served as ...
, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing.
The Prizes were preceded by a nominal prize ($100) established by Alan Karp, a
numerical analyst (then of IBM) who challenged claims of
MIMD performance improvements proposed in the Letters to the Editor section of the
Communications of the ACM
''Communications of the ACM'' (''CACM'') is the monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
History
It was established in 1958, with Saul Rosen as its first managing editor. It is sent to all ACM members.
Articles are i ...
. Karp went on to be one of the first Gordon Bell Prize judges.
Individuals or teams may apply for the award by submitting a technical paper describing their work through the SC conference submissions process. Finalists present their work at that year's conference, and their submissions are included in the conference proceedings.
Prize criteria
The ACM Gordon Bell Prize is primarily intended to recognize performance achievements that demonstrate:
* evidence of important algorithmic and/or implementation innovations
* clear improvement over the previous state-of-the-art
* solutions that don’t depend on one-of-a-kind architectures (systems that can only be used to address a narrow range of problems, or that can’t be replicated by others)
* performance measurements that have been characterized in terms of scalability (strong as well as weak scaling), time to solution, efficiency (in using bottleneck resources, such as memory size or bandwidth, communications bandwidth, I/O), and/or peak performance
* achievements that are generalizable, in the sense that other people can learn and benefit from the innovations
In earlier years, multiple prizes were sometimes awarded to reflect different types of achievements. According to current policies, the Prize can be awarded in one or more of the following categories, depending on the entries received in a given year:
Peak Performance: If the entry demonstrates outstanding performance in terms of
floating point operations per second
Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
For such cases, it is a more accurate measur ...
on an important science/engineering problem; the efficiency of the application in using bottleneck resources (such as memory size or bandwidth) is also taken into consideration.
Special Achievement in Scalability, Special Achievement in Time to Solution: If the entry demonstrates exceptional
Scalability
Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work. One definition for software systems specifies that this may be done by adding resources to the system.
In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that ...
, in terms of both strong and weak scaling, and/or total time to solve an important science/engineering problem.
See also
*
List of computer science awards
References
External links
ACM Gordon Bell Prize Winners 2006-presentGordon Bell Prize News - 2013-2022Gordon Bell Prize description from SC13ACM Gordon Bell Prize Winners 2006-2015
Gordon Bell Prize official page on ACM WebsiteThe SC (formerly "Supercomputing") Conference Series
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Awards of the Association for Computing Machinery
Computer science awards
Awards established in 1987