SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing Best Paper Prize for 2020

[Field Van Zee]

Friends of BLIS,

(Cross-posted to blis-discuss. Please forgive the duplicate messages.)

I'm pleased to share some exciting news: the paper that we internally refer to as the second BLIS paper,

"The BLIS Framework: Experiments in Portability." Field G. Van Zee, Tyler Smith, Bryan Marker, Tze Meng Low, Robert A. van de Geijn, Francisco Igual, Mikhail Smelyanskiy, Xianyi Zhang, Michael Kistler, Vernon Austel, John A. Gunnels, Lee Killough. ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS), 42(2):12:1--12:19, 2016.

was selected for the SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing Best Paper Prize for 2020. The prize is awarded once every two years to a paper judged to be the most outstanding paper in the field of parallel scientific and engineering computing, and has only been awarded once before (in 2016) since its inception in 2015 (the committee did not award the prize in 2018). The prize will be awarded at the SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing in Seattle next February. Robert will be present at the conference to accept the prize and give a talk on BLIS.

The selection committee sought to recognize the paper, "which validates BLIS, a framework relying on the notion of microkernels that enables both productivity and high performance." Their statement continues, "The framework will continue having an important influence on the design and the instantiation of dense linear algebra libraries."

Robert and I (and the rest of our coauthors) are humbled and honored to have been chosen for the prize. Of course, we are also thrilled that BLIS has received this prestigious recognition from SIAM, as it affirms that the community understands the impact BLIS has made, and continues to have, on our field.

If you happen to be at SIAM PP20 conference, please consider stopping by to listen in on Robert's talk on BLIS.

Lastly, thank you all for being part of this amazing community. Without you and your support, the SIAM selection committee may not have seen sufficient impact to select the BLIS paper as the recipient of the award. Your involvement truly matters.

We look forward to taking BLIS to new and exciting places in the future, and we value your continued contributions to the project.

Best regards,

Field