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Michela Taufer Stands in Front of SC19 Sign

EECS Professor Selected to Receive 2019 IBM Faculty Award

EECS Professor Michela Taufer, Jack Dongarra Professor in High Performance Computing, has been selected to receive a 2019 IBM Faculty Award for $20,000 USD. This award is highly competitive and recognizes her leadership in High Performance Computing and its importance to the computing industry.
 
EECS, under Taufer, Department Head Dr. Greg Peterson and EECS Distinguished Professor Jack Dongarra, is building a partnership with IBM.
 
Taufer will lead work with IBM to bring the IBM Onsite Deep Learning Workshop on campus. Deep learning and AI are the backbone of scientific discovery these days. Training EECS students in these disciplines will open tremendous opportunities for them in Tennessee and outside the state.
 
“Greg Peterson, Jack Dongarra, and I are working with IBM to launch a Summit-like IBM cluster to enable our efforts to move software to the next generation of supercomputers,” said Taufer, “while ensuring the continued leadership of UT within High Performance Computing and computational science. The Summit-like IBM cluster is an important, missing, tile of ongoing collaboration of my lab, GCLab, and Jack’s lab, the Innovative Computing Laboratory, with UT Chattanooga’s SimCenter: Computer Science and Engineering and the Bredesen Center. As part of this collaboration, we- GCLab, ICL, SimCenter, and Bredesen- presented our work in HPC and big data at the SC conference in Dallas last fall.”
 
Taufer is the General Chair of this year’s SC19 which, with its 13,000-plus attendees, is “the” HPC conference.
 
“IBM is thrilled to recognize your leadership on High Performance Computing and partnership with Oak Ridge National Lab,” Jamie M. Thomas, IBM Systems’ General Manager, Systems Strategy and Development, said of Taufer. “As the new Partnership Executive Program executive for University of Tennessee, Knoxville, I am looking forward to working with UT Knoxville to launch a Summit-like IBM cluster to enable your efforts to move software to the next generation of supercomputers while ensuring the continued leadership of UT within High Performance Computing and computational science.”