The 2023 James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software has been awarded to Field G. Van Zee and Devin A. Matthews.
Established in 1991, the Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software has been awarded every four years to the authors of an outstanding piece of numerical software.
Van Zee, who conducts research in the Oden Institute’s Science of High Performance Computing Group, and Matthews, who was an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oden Institute, were honored for their development of BLIS: a portable open-source software framework.
BLIS facilitates rapid instantiation of high-performance BLAS and BLAS-like operations targeting modern CPUs. As it is the result of decades of advances in understanding computer architectures, this software framework entails a clean separation of architecture-dependent and algorithm-dependent components, which makes porting BLIS to new architectures quick, easy, and efficient.
Van Zee and Matthews were recognized at the 2023 SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE23) where Matthews presented a talk about the software on Monday, February 27 at 4:00 p.m. CET.
Field G. Van Zee’s research has focused on exploring ways to optimize and accelerate various numerical operations, ranging from matrix multiplication to application of Householder reflectors to the QR algorithm and eigenvalue and singular value decompositions. For the last 10 years, he has focused on building the technical and social infrastructure to support and sustain BLIS and its community into a bright future of continued innovation.
Devin A. Matthews accepted an assistant professorship at Southern Methodist University after his postdoctoral fellowship at the Oden Institute. He is now a Faculty Fellow at the SMU Center for Research Computing. His research focuses on using and developing accurate theoretical methods to study molecules, reactions, clusters, and extended systems. His specialization is in ab initio methods based on quantum mechanics, combining concepts and techniques from chemistry, physics, mathematics, and computer science.