Jack Dongarra


Jack J. Dongarra ForMemRS; is an American University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science
in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. He holds
the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Turing Fellowship in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester, and is an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He served as a faculty fellow at Texas A&M University's institute for advanced study. Dongarra is the founding director of Innovative Computing Laboratory.

Education

Dongarra received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Chicago State University in 1972 and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1973. He received his Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Mathematics from the University of New Mexico in 1980 under the supervision of Cleve Moler. He worked at the Argonne National Laboratory until 1989, becoming a senior scientist.

Research and career

He specializes in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, the use of advanced computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers. His research includes the development, testing and documentation of high-quality mathematical software. He has contributed to the design and implementation of the following open-source software packages and systems: EISPACK, LINPACK, the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms, Linear Algebra Package, ScaLAPACK, Parallel Virtual Machine, Message Passing Interface, NetSolve, TOP500, Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software, High Performance Conjugate Gradient and Performance Application Programming Interface. These libraries excel in the accuracy of the underlying numerical algorithms and the reliability and performance of the software. They benefit a very wide range of users through their incorporation into software including MATLAB, Maple, Wolfram Mathematica, GNU Octave, the R programming language, SciPy, and others.
With Eric Grosse, he pioneered the distribution via email and the web of numeric open-source code collected in Netlib. He has published approximately 300 articles, papers, reports and technical memorandum and he is coauthor of several books.

Awards and honors

Dongarra was awarded the IEEE Sid Fernbach Award in 2004 for his contributions in the application of high-performance computers using innovative approaches; in 2008 he was the recipient of the first IEEE Medal of Excellence in Scalable Computing; in 2010 he was the first recipient of the SIAM Special Interest Group on Supercomputing's award for Career Achievement; in 2011 he was the recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award; in 2013 he was the recipient of the ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award for his leadership in designing and promoting standards for mathematical software used to solve numerical problems common to high-performance computing; in 2019 he received the SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science; and in 2020 he received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award for leadership in the area of high-performance mathematical software. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a foreign member of the Royal Society, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States.