Dongarra Professor Michela Taufer has been named the recipient of the 2025 Achievement Award in High Performance Distributed Computing for her contributions to volunteer computing and advancing high-performance computing. Established in 2012, this annual Achievement Award is presented to individuals who have had a long-lasting impact on the foundations or practice of distributed and parallel computing.

Taufer will deliver a keynote address and be recognized at the 2025 ACM International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC), one of the premier conferences in the field of high-performance computing, taking place July 20–23 at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Her keynote, titled Designing for Trust, Transparency, and Efficiency in Scientific Computing, will explore practical solutions for addressing nondeterminism, opaque AI processes, and growing energy demands in large-scale scientific workflows.

One of the past winners of the award is Jack Dongarra (2016), an emeritus professor in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Taufer currently holds the title of the Jack Dongarra Endowed Professorship in EECS.

Along with her achievement award, Taufer recently received a $219,000 award from the National Science Foundation for Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE), a project that creates a software ecosystem supporting terrain parameter analysis. Research Assistant Professor Jack Marquez is the principal investigator, and Taufer and Research Assistant Professor Kin NG are co-PIs.

The research focuses on building sustainable open-source infrastructure that enables scientific and practitioner communities to use terrain data for a wide range of applications, including agriculture, wildfire management, forestry, and environmental monitoring.

Contact

Rhiannon Potkey (rpotkey@utk.edu)