Electrical and computer engineering alum David Bader ’90 ’91G has been named as the 2021 recipient of the Sidney Fernbach Award, given by the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS).
Bader is a Distinguished Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is also founder of NJIT's Department of Data Science and inaugural director of its Institute for Data Science. He earned his BS in electrical engineering from Lehigh in 1990 and his MS in computer engineering in 1991.
The award, established in 1992 in memory of high-performance computing pioneer Sidney Fernbach, recognizes outstanding contributions in the application of high-performance computers using innovative approaches. Bader was cited for the development of Linux-based massively parallel production computers and for pioneering contributions to scalable discrete parallel algorithms for real-world applications.
“David has expanded the realm of supercomputing from narrow sets of technical computing to be the leading edge of mainstream computing we see today in massive cluster-based supercomputers such as Fugaku, as well as hyperscaler clouds,” said Satoshi Matsuoka, director of RIKEN Center for Computational Science. “As supercomputing progresses onwards, we should further continue to observe other elements in which David has contributed to their genesis.”
“Today, 100% of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world are Linux HPC systems, based on Bader’s technical contributions and leadership. This is one of the most significant technical foundations of HPC,” noted Steve Wallach, a guest scientist for Los Alamos National Laboratory and 2008 IEEE CS Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award recipient.
Bader’s interests are at the intersection of high-performance computing and real-world applications, including cybersecurity, massive-scale analytics, and computational genomics. He has served as a lead scientist in several DARPA programs. He has co-authored over 300 scholarly papers and has best paper awards from ISC, IEEE HPEC, and ACM/IEEE SC.
Bader is editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing, and General Co-Chair of IPDPS 2021. He previously served as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.
Bader is a Fellow of the IEEE, AAAS, and SIAM, and advises the White House, most recently on the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) and Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem (FACE).
The award will be presented to Bader at the SC21 Conference awards plenary session in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 16, 2021.
For more details on Bader’s work and achievements, read the full press release from the IEEE Computer Society.
