IAS Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Professor Public Lecture 8 July 2025

"Bright Light: Computing Then, Now and To Be"

In this talk, we examine how high-performance computing has changed over the last 10 years and look toward the future in terms of trends. These changes have had and will continue to have a major impact on our software. Some of the software and algorithm challenges have already been encountered, such as management of communication and memory hierarchies through a combination of compile--time and run--time techniques, but the increased scale of computation, depth of memory hierarchies, range of latencies, and increased run--time environment variability will make these problems much harder.  We will look at five areas of research that will have an important impact on the development of software and algorithms.

About the speaker [More info]: Prof Jack Dongarra specialises in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, the use of advanced computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers. He holds appointments at the University of Manchester, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the University of Tennessee.

In 2019 he received the ACM/SIAM Computational Science and Engineering Prize. In 2020 he received the IEEE-CS Computer Pioneer Award. In 2021 he received the ACM A.M. Turing Award for his pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and software that have driven decades of extraordinary progress in computing performance and applications.  He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM; a foreign member of the British Royal Society and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.