Livny earns distributed computing award

Miron Livny, a UW–Madison computer sciences professor and director of core computational technology at the Morgridge Institute for Research and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, has been honored for his groundbreaking contributions to the field with the 2013 High Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC) Achievement Award.

The HPDC conference established the annual achievement award to recognize leading computer scientists who have made long-lasting and influential contributions to the foundation or practice of high-performance parallel and distributed computing. The award reflects achievements in one or more of the following areas:

• Conceptual advances that have influenced the design or operation of HPDC systems or applications.
• Innovative techniques or tools for the design or analysis of HPDC systems or applications.
• The design, implementation and deployment of HPDC systems, applications and innovative components.
• The analysis of innovative HPDC systems or applications including components.

Livny recently accepted the award at the 22nd annual Association for Computing Machinery’s HPDC conference in New York.

“It’s an honor to have our pioneering work in the area of high throughput computing recognized by the HPDC community,” Livny said. “At the same time, the award calls attention to the impact a long-term commitment to experimental computer science work can have on scientific discovery in domains ranging from economics to high energy physics and from human health to geology.”

As the director of the UW–Madison Center for High Throughput Computing and principal investigator of the Open Science Grid, Livny continues to advance and promote the adoption of high throughput computing technologies. A recent award by the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate to a team led by the Morgridge Institute for Research to build and operate a national software assurance marketplace will enhance the ability of the open-source software tools that harness computing resources located on campuses and institutions throughout the U.S. to accelerate scientific discovery.