[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)
 
web link (amturing.acm.org)
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
| <>. 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 <> 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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