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Professor Michela Taufer has been selected to receive a 2019 IBM Faculty Award. This highly competitive award recognizes her leadership in high-performance computing and its importance to the computing industry.

Taufer to Receive 2019 IBM Faculty Award


Professor Michela Taufer has been selected to receive a 2019 IBM Faculty Award for $20,000. This highly competitive award recognizes her leadership in high-performance computing (HPC) and its importance to the computing industry.

UT’s Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is building a partnership with IBM under leadership by Taufer, Department Head Greg Peterson, and Distinguished Professor Jack Dongarra.

Taufer will lead work with IBM to bring the IBM Onsite Deep Learning Workshop on campus. Training EECS students in deep learning and AI disciplines—the backbone of current scientific discovery—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 while ensuring the continued leadership of UT within high-performance computing and computational science,” said Taufer. “The cluster is an important missing tile of ongoing collaboration of my lab, GCLab, and Jack’s Innovative Computing Laboratory, with UT Chattanooga’s SimCenter: Computer Science and Engineering, and the Bredesen Center. As part of this collaboration, we presented our work in HPC and big data at the SC conference in Dallas last fall.”

Taufer, the Jack Dongarra Professor in High Performance Computing, is the general chair of this year’s SC19. With 13,000-plus attendees, this is “the” high-performance computing conference.

“IBM is thrilled to recognize Taufer’s leadership on high-performance computing and partnership with Oak Ridge National Lab,” said Jamie M. Thomas, IBM Systems’ general manager of systems strategy and development.