Ignacio Laguna, a PhD student in Prof. Saurabh Bagchi's group, is one of two recipients of the 2011 George Michael Memorial High-Performance Computing (HPC) Fellowship, which was awarded to him at this year’s Supercomputing Conference (SC) in Seattle on November 17. This award recognizes Ignacio's work, which aims to provide scalable error detection and bug localization tools for large-scale applications.

Ignacio has done significant work with scientists at one of the Department of Energy’s labs, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), developing his techniques for large-scale parallel applications and applying them to real bugs encountered by scientists in their applications. At SC this year, he presented in a regular paper a fault tolerance algorithm that he has shown can scale up to large sizes of LLNL’s clusters.

The fellowship honors exceptional Ph.D. students who have shown potential for impact in HPC research, as evidenced by their publications, recommendation letters, and research plan. George A. Michael, the award's namesake, was a well-known and tireless advocate of HPC, and founded the SC conference series in 1987. This is a highly competitive program established by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE Computer Society and SC Conference series with two fellowships awarded from world-wide nominations this year.

Ignacio hopes to continue to do stellar work in tackling the bugs that arise when applications have to deal with large scale in terms of the number of executing processes and sizes of data. Further, he is excited to continue to work with scientists and transition his tools to them—a process he has already begun by advancing his work published at IEEE/IFIP International Symposium on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) last year to run at scale in the largest supercomputers.

Ignacio receiving the plaque for the George Michael HPC Fellowship from Bill Kramer, the HPC fellowship chair, at this year’s Supercomputing Conference