Miron Livny, lead investigator of computing technologies at the Morgridge Institute for Research and director of the Center for High Throughput Computing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, won the 2020 IEEE Outstanding Technical Achievement Award due to his influential contribution of the HTCondor system for distributed and high-throughput computing.
Livny launched HTCondor in 1985 in order to streamline computing-intensive jobs by creating a specialized workload management system, a system now used worldwide in the scientific community.
“[This award is a] recognition of our approach to computer science research and the power of the principals that have been driving our work,” Livny says. “It is also an opportunity to tell the story of a sustained team effort that spans more than three decades.”
Livny also is the John P. Morgridge professor of computer science at UW–Madison.
Serving as the technical director of the Open Science Grid at the Morgridge Institute, Livny has collaborated with researchers for the past three decades to form a wide spectrum of science domains. Two of these projects — the discoveries of the Higgs boson particle and gravitational waves — were recently awarded Nobel prizes in physics.
“[It’s an] opportunity to take stock of what we have accomplished and realize how much more needs to be done to translate the core ideas of my PhD work into advancing the role distributed computing plays in scientific discovery,” Livny says.
IEEE is the world’s leading professional organization for the advancement of technology. The outstanding technical achievement awards are chosen each year by IEEE’s Technical Committee on Distributed Processing (TCDP).