2022 SIGHPC Doctoral Dissertation Award Winner 

2022 SIGHPC Doctoral Dissertation Award Winner  

ACM's Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) is pleased to announce that Dr. Maciej Besta of ETH Zürich has won the 2022 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, and includes a $2,000 cash prize, a plaque, and recognition at the International Supercomputing Conference (SC’XY) in November. Nominations were evaluated on technical depth, the significance of the research contribution, the potential impact on theory and practice, and overall quality of work.

This year’s award is presented for outstanding contributions that demonstrate how to simultaneously achieve high performance, large scale, and programmability in highly challenging and relevant irregular computations. Dr. Besta’s dissertation, titled “Enabling High-Performance Large-Scale Irregular Computations” is noted not only for the significant contributions it made to the field, but also the depth and thoroughness of the work.

Dr. Besta received his PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zürich in 2021. He received the Best student paper award at SC19 for his paper titled “Red-Blue Pebbling Revisited: Near Optimal Parallel Matrix Multiplication”.

“I want to thank SIGHPC for this wonderful recognition,” said Dr. Besta. “Irregular computations are an important part of today's compute landscape, underlying domains such as graph databases, graph neural networks, graph pattern matching, or graph streaming. I hope that my dissertation will contribute to increasing their performance, scale, and cost as well as power effectiveness. I also want to thank my thesis advisor and mentor, Torsten Hoefler, for his amazing support.”

“The breadth and depth of Dr. Besta’s dissertation truly highlights his innovations in and passion for the field of High-Performance Computing. We are thrilled to grant this year’s Dissertation Award to such a strong and well-formed body of research that exemplifies the kind of work that makes our community more effective and raises the standards of the profession,” said Christine Harvey, SIGHPC Chair. “The applicant pool was made up of outstanding recent PhDs, whom we hope will continue to contribute to HPC techniques and technologies in the future.”

Honorable Mention

In addition, SIGHPC selected one submission for Honorable Mention in the 2022 Dissertation Award.

Dr. Kazem Cheshmi (University of Toronto) was selected for contributions to the efficient code generation and transformation of sparse computations for parallel architectures. He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McMaster University.