Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award
2023 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award
ACM's Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) is pleased to announce that Dr. Keren Zhou has won the 2023 SIGHPC Doctoral Dissertation Award. This award is given each year for the best doctoral dissertation completed in high performance computing (HPC) in the previous year. Nominations were evaluated on the novelty of the work, quality of scholarship, significance of the research contributions, and potential impact on theory and practice. The award includes a $2,000 cash prize, a plaque, and recognition at the International Supercomputing Conference (SC’XY) in November.
Dr. Zhou's dissertation tackled the difficult research problem of understanding the performance of application codes accelerated on graphical processing units (GPUs), through the design and development of innovative techniques for performance instrumentation, measurement, and analysis, particularly in the context of the latest GPU technologies in use on high-end HPC platforms. His work not only made novel contributions to the state of performance art, but the methods have been integrated in real HPC tools and applied in the optimization of real-world heterogeneous HPC applications on modern supercomputers.
Dr. Zhou received his PhD in Computer Science from Rice University in 2022. Following completion of his graduate studies, Dr. Zhou worked as a member of the technical staff at OpenAI. Dr. Zhou will be an Assistant Professor at George Mason University starting in August 2023.
Award Information
Previous Winners
About the Award
This award is open to students studying anywhere in the world who have completed a PhD dissertation with HPC as a central research theme. In this case, HPC refers to the study or application of computational capabilities delivering much higher performance or larger scales than could be accomplished with a desktop or simple server system in order to solve large problems.
To qualify for the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, the dissertation must:
Have been successfully defended (or accepted by the committee if no defense is required) during the calendar year
Be submitted in the final form that was accepted by the department
Be submitted in English
The award is presented during the annual SC conference. The awardee is recognized with a $2,000 cash prize, a plaque, and travel support to SC.
See how to nominate for more information on nominations, current deadlines, and the link to start the process, or check out the FAQ for answers to common questions.
