Gordon Bell Prize

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The Gordon Bell Prizes are a set of awards awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery in conjunction with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers each year at The Supercomputing Conference to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing applications. The main purpose of the award is to acknowledge, reward, and thereby assess the progress of parallel computing. The awards were established in 1987.

The Prizes were preceded by a similar much smaller prize (nominal) by Alan Karp (then of IBM) challenging claims of MIMD performance improvements proposed in the Letters to the Editor section of the Communications of the ACM who went on to be one of the first Bell Prize judges. Cash prizes accompany these recognitions and are funded by the award founder, Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing.

[edit] Prize categories

Depending on the entries received in a given year, prizes can be awarded in following categories:

Peak Performance: Awarded to the entry demonstrating the highest performance achieved in terms of operations per second on a genuine application program.

Price/Performance: Awarded to the entry demonstrating the best price-performance ratio as measured in megaflop/s per dollar on a genuine application.

Special: Awarded to the entry whose performance is short of that of the Peak Performance prize, which nevertheless utilizes innovative techniques to produce new levels of performance on a real application. Such techniques may be, for instance, in mathematical algorithms, data structures, or implementations.