2024 SIGHPC Doctoral Dissertation Award Winner 

2024 SIGHPC Doctoral Dissertation Award Winner  

ACM's Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) is pleased to announce that Dr. William S. Moses has won the 2024 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 Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC'24) in November, 2024.

Dr. Moses' dissertation addresses how general-purpose compilers can efficiently support domain-specific abstractions.  The tools he developed enable domain experts to exploit high-performance computing without becoming HPC experts themselves.  His research work overturns the conventional wisdom that domain-specific abstractions must be implemented by source-code tools.  For instance, Moses' Tapir compiler optimizes parallel code by embedding parallelism directly into the compiler's internal representation.  Tapir now forms the basis of the open-source OpenCilk compiler.  As another example, the Enzyme compiler showed that derivatives of arbitrary functions expressed as program code can be generated automatically, yielding significant performance improvement over source-based tools.  A key advantage of Moses' compiler-based approach is composability, allowing seamless combination of compiler tools.

"Compilers can democratize access to computing.  Today, high performance computing has become so fundamental to all fields of science that each physicist, chemist, and climate scientist must earn a second Ph.D. degree in computing just to do their research," said Dr. Moses.  "Instead of requiring each user to bear this burden, endowing the compiler with this expertise lets researchers write the code they want and still leverage the latest developments in the field like parallelism, security, and machine learning."

Dr. Moses received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Currently, he is in his first year as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Moses is also a researcher at Google Deepmind.

"The SIGHPC Doctoral Dissertation Award nominations received this year were twice the number of last year, and each dissertation was an outstanding contribution in a distinct area of HPC," said Christine Harvey, SIGHPC Chair.  "Dr. Moses' research is an impressive achievement and a definitive statement on the ability of general-purpose compiler technologies to deliver important HPC capabilities, enabling HPC applications to exploit domain-specific abstractions efficiently.  We hope all of the nominees will continue their excellent work and contribute to the HPC community in the future."

The Doctoral Dissertation Award committee was composed of nine international HPC researchers: Michela Becchi (North Carolina State University), Wu Feng (Virginia Tech), Shantenu Jha (Rutgers University), Allen D. Malony (Chair, University of Oregon), Martin Schulz (Technical University of Munich), Nathan Tallent (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Ana Lucia Varbanescu (University of Twente) Michel Weiland (EPCC, University of Edinburgh), and Stefan Wild (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory).

Honorable Mention

Given the high-quality of dissertations this year, the SIGHPC Doctoral Dissertation Award committee decided on an Honorable Mention award.  The winner is Dr. Tirthak Patel for his dissertation on the design and implementation of innovative hybrid classical-HPC and quantum computing system software, as well as accelerating hybrid research through open-source, reproducible real-system prototypes.  Dr. Patel is a first-year Assistant Professor at Rice University.  He will receive a certificate at the SC'24 awards ceremony in honor of his achievement.