Seattle, WA — November 16, 2005 -- John Bell, a senior mathematician at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Steven Scott, the chief architect of the Cray X1 supercomputer, have been named recipients of the 2005 Sidney Fernbach Award and the Seymour Cray Science & Engineering Award, respectively.

The awards are given by the IEEE Computer Society for contributions in high performance computer systems and applications using innovative approaches. The awards were presented at SC|05, the international conference for high performance computing networking and storage held Nov. 12-18 in Seattle. In conjunction with the award, Bell and Scott will give special lectures today.

Scott, the chief architect of the Cray X1 supercomputer, was named for developing a highly scalable, distributed shared memory multiprocessor, employing custom vector processors. The Cray X1 is a shared memory multiprocessor capable of scaling to kilo-processor count employing a custom vector processor and efficient synchronization between scalar/vector pipelines, single-stream processors (SSPs), as well as multi-stream processors (MSPs).

According to the IEEE Computer Society citation, “There are some in the field who have perhaps one successful system to their credit, but not a sustained career of success. Steven Scott stands almost alone in sustained, commercially successful, high-end computers in the spirit of Seymour Cray.”

Bell, Department Head for the Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering in the Computational Research Division, was named for his outstanding contributions to the development of numerical algorithms, mathematical, and computational tools and the application of those methods to conduct leading-edge scientific investigations in combustion, fluid dynamics and condensed matter.

“John is at the top-most tier of the computational science community,” according to the citation. “His sustained record of outstanding technical contributions broadly used and accepted techniques and top quality mathematical software packages clearly qualify him for the Fernbach Award.”

About SC SC|05, sponsored by ACM and IEEE, is the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking and storage, will showcase how high performance computing, networking, storage and analytics lead to advances in research, education and commerce. The conference includes technical and education programs, workshops, tutorials, an exhibit area, demonstrations and hands-on learning.