Ana Veroneze Solórzano of Northeastern University and Yafan Huang of The University of Iowa are the recipients of the 2025 ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships. Aristotle Martin of Duke University receives an honorable mention this year. The George Michael Memorial Fellowship honors exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is high-performance computing (HPC) applications, networking, storage, or large-scale data analytics.
Solórzano is recognized for broadening the societal impact of HPC using privacy-preserving and incentive-driven mechanisms. Huang is recognized for advancing exascale high performance computing by creating ultra-fast lossy compression algorithms and versatile program-agnostic fault tolerance.
Ana Veroneze Solórzano
Solórzano’s research reflects her interest in advancing the design and operation of HPC systems. She has explored a broad range of technologies and developed solutions that enhance system capabilities. Her work highlights include an incentive-based power-control strategy on the Fugaku supercomputer—the first in-production deployment of such a strategy on one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Fugaku’s incentive program, Fugaku Points, provides users with knobs to apply power-control functions and improve the overall power efficiency of the system, contributing to HPC sustainability. The insights from this project have opened new research directions in incentive-driven resource management and user engagement for energy efficiency.
She is one of the leading researchers to bring differential privacy (DP) to the HPC community (i.e., protecting personally identifiable information when sharing traces/logs across multiple parties). She designed and implemented the first tool to apply differential privacy to HPC system traces. Her tool supports both aggregated and raw data and facilitates configuring the amount of noise added or exploring different privacy budgets for adoption by HPC system administrators. Solórzano has demonstrated the effectiveness of her tool by evaluating it on several real-world HPC traces.
Yafan Huang
Huang’s primary research focus lies in robust data compression and fault tolerance software support for HPC systems—two areas of critical importance for HPC and large-scale scientific computing. One of the major aspects of Huang’s research is providing robust software support for soft error detection in HPC systems. With the growing scale of supercomputers, soft errors, also known as transient hardware faults, in memory and computation pose a serious threat to reliability. Huang has developed novel techniques that go beyond traditional error detection approaches by considering complex fault patterns. His work also integrates compiler-level code transformations and program analysis to ensure high detection effectiveness without significantly impacting performance.
In addition to his work in fault tolerance, Huang has made groundbreaking contributions to data reduction for scientific computing. He developed cuSZp, an ultra-fast GPU lossy compression framework that significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art solutions. Unlike traditional compression techniques, which often struggle to balance speed, compression ratios, and data quality, cuSZp achieves all three by algorithm innovations and system optimizations, making it a transformative tool for scientific applications that require real-time in-situ data processing and memory footprint reduction.
Honorable Mention
Aristotle Martin’s work involves developing a heterogeneous, performance-portable multiscale modeling framework leveraging exascale systems for large-scale adhesive transport simulations of circulating tumor cells.
The ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship is endowed in memory of George Michael, one of the founders of the SC Conference series. The fellowship honors exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is on high performance computing applications, networking, storage, or large-scale data analytics using the most powerful computers that are currently available. The Fellowship includes a $5,000 honorarium and travel expenses to attend the SC conference, where the Fellowships are formally presented.
