APPLICATIONS

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced that Burton J. Smith, Cray's chief scientist, was awarded the prestigious Seymour Cray Computer Science and Engineering Award. Established in 1998 by the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors, the Seymour Cray Award is given each year to recognize innovative contributions to high-performance computing that best exemplify the creative spirit demonstrated by the late Seymour Cray, widely considered "the father of the supercomputer." The award includes a crystal model, certificate, and honorarium of $10,000. Dr. Smith accepted the award at SC2003, the annual high-performance computing conference, held this year in Phoenix, Arizona. Dr. Smith is specifically named for his "ingenious and sustained contributions to designs and implementations at the frontier of high performance computing and especially for his sustained championing of the use of multithreading to enable parallel execution and overcome latency and to achieve high performance in industrially significant products". "It is a great honor to be recognized by my peers in the HPC community," said Smith. "Innovation by many individuals and organizations has enabled high-performance computing to make enormous contributions to science, engineering, national security and the quality of life. On behalf of Cray and all my friends in the HPC community, I look forward to seeing the continued benefits that innovative ideas will make possible." Previous recipients of the Seymour Cray Award include John Cocke, Glen Culler, John L. Hennessy, and Monty Denneau. Dr. Burton Smith is one of the company's co-founders and has been chief scientist and a director since 1988. He served as chairman from 1988 to June 1999. He is a recognized authority on high-performance computer architecture and programming languages for parallel computers. He is the principal architect of the Cray MTA-2(TM) system and heads the Cascade program, Cray's DARPA-funded initiative to develop a high-productivity supercomputer with sustained petaflops speed. Smith was a fellow of the Supercomputing Research Center (now Center for Computing Sciences), a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses, from 1985 to 1988. He was honored in 1990 with the Eckert-Mauchly Award given jointly by the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery, and was elected a fellow of both organizations in 1994. In February 2003, he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Smith received S.M., E.E. and Sc.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.