Alumnus Wins Early-Career Research Award

A Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) alumnus is one of three people honored for their promising research in high-performance computing (HPC).

Edgar Solomonik, a fellow from 2010 to 2014, is a 2018 winner of the Technical Consortium on High Performance Computing Early Career Researchers Award, sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society. The winners will be honored in November at SC18, the international supercomputing conference, in Dallas.

An SC18 release says the award “recognizes up to three individuals who have made outstanding, influential, and potentially long-lasting contributions in the field of high-performance computing within five years of receiving their Ph.D.” as of January 1 of the award’s year.

Solomonik is an assistant professor in the scientific computing group of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his doctorate in 2014 at the University of California, Berkeley, and later was a postdoctoral fellow at Switzerland’s ETH Zurich.

Solomonik has developed improved numerical algorithms and high-performance computing libraries. His research group, the Laboratory for Parallel Numerical Algorithms, leads the development of the Cyclops library for tensor computations. Cyclops, which sprang from Solomonik’s 2011 DOE CSGF practicum at Argonne National Laboratory, has enabled groundbreaking simulations of electronic structure and quantum circuits. It also has applications in graph and data analysis.

The other honorees are Lin Gan of Tsinghua University and the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China, and Argonne’s Min Si.

The award is sponsored by the IEEE-CS Technical Consortium on High Performance Computing (TCHPC) and its member Technical Committees. The selection committee includes DOE CSGF alumna Amanda Randles, an assistant professor of biomedical sciences at Duke University.