Tag Archives: Andreas Waechter

Wilkinson Prize for numerical software: call for 2015 submissions

The Wilkinson Prize is not meant to recognize a nice, shiny new algorithm, rather it’s meant for the implementation phase and, as anyone who have ever been involved in that phase of a project can tell you, that phase is often sadly neglected. So, bravo for the Wilkinson Prize!

From the March 27, 2014 Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) news release, here’s a brief history of the Wilkinson Prize,

Every four years the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and Argonne National Laboratory award the prestigious Wilkinson Prize in honour of the outstanding contributions of Dr James Hardy Wilkinson to the field of numerical software. The next Wilkinson Prize will be awarded at the [2015] International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics in Beijing, and will consist of a $3000 cash prize.

NAG, NPL [UK National Physical Laboratory] and Argonne [US Dept. of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory] are committed to encouraging innovative, insightful and original work in numerical software in the same way that Wilkinson inspired many throughout his career. Wilkinson worked on the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) while at NPL and later authored numerous papers on his speciality, numerical analysis. He also authored many of the routines for matrix computation in the early marks of the NAG Library.

The most recent Wilkinson Prize was awarded in 2011 to Andreas Waechter and Carl D. Laird for IPOPT. Commenting on winning the Wilkinson Prize Carl D. Laird, Associate Professor at the School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, said “I love writing software, and working with Andreas on IPOPT was a highlight of my career. From the beginning, our goal was to produce great software that would be used by other researchers and provide solutions to real engineering and scientific problems.

The Wilkinson Prize is one of the few awards that recognises the importance of implementation – that you need more than a great algorithm to produce high-impact numerical software. It rewards the tremendous effort required to ensure reliability, efficiency, and usability of the software.

Here’s more about the prize (list of previous winners, eligibility, etc.), from the Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software call for submissions webpage,

Previous Prize winners:

  • 2011: Andreas Waechter and Carl D. Laird for Ipopt
  • 2007: Wolfgang Bangerth for deal.II
  • 2003: Jonathan Shewchuch for Triangle
  • 1999: Matteo Frigo and Steven Johnson for FFTW.
  • 1995: Chris Bischof and Alan Carle for ADIFOR 2.0.
  • 1991: Linda Petzold for DASSL.

Eligibility

The prize will be awarded to the authors of an outstanding piece of numerical software, or to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to an existing piece of numerical software. In the latter case applicants must clearly be able to distinguish their personal contribution and to have that contribution authenticated, and the submission must be written in terms of that personal contribution and not of the software as a whole. To encourage researchers in the earlier stages of their career all applicants must be at most 40 years of age on January 1, 2014.
Rules for Submission

Each entry must contain the following:

Software written in a widely available high-level programming language.
A two-page summary of the main features of the algorithm and software implementation.
A paper describing the algorithm and the software implementation. The paper should give an analysis of the algorithm and indicate any special programming features.
Documentation of the software which describes its purpose and method of use.
Examples of use of the software, including a test program and data.

Submissions

The preferred format for submissions is a gzipped, tar archive or a zip file. Please contact us if you would like to use a different submission mechanism. Submissions should include a README file describing the contents of the archive and scripts for executing the test programs. Submissions can be sent by email to wilkinson-prize@nag.co.uk. Contact this address for further information.

The closing date for submissions is July 1, 2014.

Good luck to you all!