UChicago/Argonne Collaboration Named One of Year’s 100 Best Innovations
A team of UChicago and Argonne computer scientists made one of the most prestigious annual lists in innovation and technology with a programming language that makes it easier to run parallel applications on supercomputers. Swift/T, an implementation of the Swift language for high-performance computing, was named on R&D Magazine’s R&D 100 list for 2018, “honoring great R&D pioneers and their revolutionary ideas in science and technology.”
The Swift/T team included Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science Ian Foster and UChicago CS Ph.D. graduate Tim Armstrong, now a software engineer at Cloudera. Other members of the team include Justin Wozniak, Jonathan Ozik, Nicholson Collier, and Michael Wilde of Argonne, and Daniel Katz of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“We are greatly appreciative of this recognition,” Wozniak told Argonne’s Jo Napolitano. “It’s great to see that the research, technology and scientific applications put together by the team are valued by the greater R&D community.”
Using Swift/T, researchers have exploited the advantages of parallel computing on some of the world’s fastest computers, such as the Mira and Theta machines at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and Summit at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. The language has been used to perform deep learning and simulation tasks in research on cancer, combustion engine design, and other applications. Swift/T is also in use by many projects from the U.S. Department of Energy Exascale Computing Project, which brings together key exascale-ready applications and emerging software technologies.
For more on Swift/T and other Swift projects, visit http://swift-lang.org.
