Rajeev Thakur

Digital Library

ACM Software System Award

USA - 2024

citation

For MPICH, which has powered 30 years of progress in computational science and engineering by providing scalable, robust, and portable communication software for parallel computers.

MPICH development began in 1992 as a proof of concept for the emerging Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. The project not only demonstrated the feasibility of MPI, but also played a pivotal role in shaping the standard itself-guiding it toward a design that was both straightforward to use and practical to implement. The name "MPICH" reflects a combination of "MPI" with "Chameleon," a predecessor system on which the original implementation was based.

Beyond influencing the standardization process, MPICH quickly became widely adopted due to its key strengths: it closely tracked the evolving MPI standard, was freely available, highly portable, reliable, and delivered strong performance across diverse computing systems. Its foundational role extended further, serving as the basis for many other MPI implementations that followed.

By making MPI broadly accessible and effective in practice, MPICH established MPI as the lingua franca of parallel computing. It enabled researchers and developers to write portable parallel programs that could seamlessly move across teams, institutions, and platforms-unlocking unprecedented collaboration and accelerating progress in science and engineering worldwide.

Press Release

2024 ACM Software System Award

William Gropp, University of Illinois; Pavan Balaji, Meta; Rajeev Thakur, Yanfei Guo, Kenneth Raffenetti, and Hui Zhou (all of Argonne National Laboratory), receive the ACM Software System Award for MPICH , which has powered 30 years of progress in computational science and engineering by providing scalable, robust, and portable communication software for parallel computers.

The development of the MPICH software system began in 1992 as proof-of-concept for the emerging Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. The project not only demonstrated the feasibility of MPI but also played a pivotal role in shaping the standard itself—guiding it toward a design that was both straightforward to use and practical to implement. The name "MPICH" reflects a combination of "MPI" with "Chameleon," a predecessor system on which the original implementation was based.

By making MPI broadly accessible and effective in practice, MPICH established MPI as a universal standard for parallel computing. It enabled researchers and developers to write portable parallel programs that could seamlessly move across teams, institutions, and platforms—unlocking unprecedented collaboration and accelerating progress in science and engineering worldwide.