David Keyes, an applied mathematician with a long history of involvement in ASCR research, has been named the recipient of the 2007 Sidney Fernbach Award. The award was established in 1992 in memory of Sidney Fernbach, a pioneer in the development and application of high performance computers, and is given by the IEEE Computer Society for innovative uses of high-performance computing in problem solving. Keyes was designated the 2007 recipient in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the development of scalable numerical algorithms for the solution of nonlinear partial differential equations as well as his exceptional leadership in high-performance computation. The award will be presented at SC07, the international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis to be held November 10-16, 2007 in Reno, NV. Keyes will give a plenary lecture at the conference as part of a special awards session.
Regarding Keyes’s selection, SC07 Awards Chair Steven Ashby of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said, "Dr. Keyes is well deserving of this prestigious award. He has made major advances in both the theory and application of scalable numerical algorithms, and in so doing, has enabled the simulation of many important physical phenomena. Keyes is proof that Fernbach's spirit is alive and well."
Keyes, the Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, is currently the director of the TOPS (Towards Optimal Petascale Simulations) SciDAC center. In addition to directing the nine-institution TOPS center, he is the chair of the steering committee for the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program. For the past eight years, he has been the acting director of the Institute for Scientific Computing Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He is also affiliated with the Computational Science Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, and the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 2003, he organized the "Science-based Case for Large-scale Simulation" (SCaLeS) workshop for the DOE Office of Science and was editor-in-chief of the resulting two-volume report and chaired the 2007 SciDAC Conference in Boston, MA. Author or co-author of over 100 publications in computational science and engineering, numerical analysis, and computer science, Keyes works primarily at the algorithmic interface between parallel computing and the numerical analysis of partial differential equations, with a broad range of applications spanning aerodynamic, geophysical, and chemically reacting flows. He has been a leader in the development of Newton-Krylov-Schwarz methods for the efficient solution of nonlinear partial differential equations on high performance computers. These methods, which became a subject of research only in the 1990s, are today central to effectively treating many challenging applications, including aerodynamics, radiation transport, acoustics, and magnetohydrodynamics. They have been incorporated into open mathematical software libraries, such as the PETSc suite developed at Argonne National Laboratory, that have enabled hundreds of users to make efficient use of parallel computers, from small clusters to the world's largest supercomputers. Keyes’s previous awards include the 1999 Gordon Bell Prize for High Performance Computing, Special Category (shared). More information about him can be found on his home page.