Jesús Labarta

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society IEEE CS) have named Jesύs Labarta of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) as the recipient of the 2017 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award.  Labarta is recognized for his seminal contributions to programming models and performance analysis tools for high performance computing. The award will be presented at SC 17: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, November 12-17, in Denver, Colorado.

Throughout his career, Labarta has developed tools for scientists and engineers working in parallel programming.  In the programming models area, he made fundamental contributions to the concept of asynchronous task-based models and intelligent runtime systems. With Labarta’s approach, by using pragma directives that specify the region of code that constitutes tasks and the directionality of the data used by them, the programmer has a unified mechanism to allow intelligent runtime systems to detect and exploit concurrency as well as to manage locality. These ideas have been developed by Labarta’s team on the OmpSs model and Nanos runtime.  His team’s work has also enhanced the interoperability between OmpSs (later Open multi-processing (MP)) and message passing interface (MPI).

In the performance tools area, Labarta’s team develops and distributes Open Source Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC) tools that are employed throughout the field. These BSC tools are designed to analyze an application’s behavior and identify issues that may impact performance. Paraver, the most widely used BSC tool, is a trace-based performance analyzer that processes and extracts information. Other tools like Dimemas or the Performance Analytics modules developed by Labarta’s team help squeeze relevant insight and perform predictive analyses from the raw performance data captured by the instrumentation packages.

Labarta is Director of the Computer Science Department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and a Professor of Computer Architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.  From 1996 to 2004 he served as the Director of the European Center of Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA). He has published more than 250 articles in conferences and journals in areas including high performance architectures and systems software.  He has been involved in research and cooperation with many leading companies on HPC-related topics. Currently Labarta is the leader of the Performance Optimization and Productivity EU Center of Excellence where more than 100 users (both academic and SMEs) from a very wide range of application sectors receive performance assessments and suggestions for code refactoring efforts.

ACM and the IEEE Computer Society co-sponsor the Kennedy Award, which was established in 2009 to recognize substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and significant community service or mentoring contributions. It was named for the late Ken Kennedy, founder of Rice University’s computer science program and a world expert on high performance computing. The Kennedy Award carries a US $5,000 honorarium endowed by the SC Conference Steering Committee.