The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced Bill Gropp, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, was one of six researchers to receive the 2024 ACM Software System Award for their innovative work on MPICH, a high-performance and widely portable implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard.
The ACM Software System Award is presented to an institution or individual(s) recognized for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, commercial acceptance or both. Created more than three decades ago, MPICH has become the standard bearer for MPI, efficiently supporting different computation and communication platforms and enabling cutting-edge research.
It’s a tremendous honor to receive this award from ACM alongside my colleagues and friends of so many years. It’s humbling to see MPICH have a lasting legacy of which everyone involved can be so proud.
Bill Gropp, NCSA Director
Gropp began developing MPICH in 1992 while working at the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). He built on his previous message-passing software package, Chameleon, which is how MPICH got its name, with “CH” representing its predecessor.
“At ANL, I worked closely with Rusty Lusk, who was an early and active partner on MPICH,” Gropp said. “Sadly, Rusty passed away a few years ago, or he would surely be one of the members recognized with this award.
“Our goal was to implement the new standard and prove it could be done efficiently on all major platforms.”
Over the years, others joined the project, including fellow ACM awardees Pavan Balaji, Rajeev Thakur, Yanfei Guo, Kenneth Raffenetti, and Hui Zhou. All played major roles in the development of MPICH, especially following Gropp’s departure to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
MPICH, “which has powered 30 years of progress in computational science and engineering by providing scalable, robust, and portable communication software for parallel computers,” according to the ACM release, has evolved over the years, meeting the needs of researchers as the environment has shifted. The team released version 4.3.0 in February.
“There aren’t many software products still in wide use 30 years after their initial release,” Gropp said. “It speaks well of the design of both MPICH and the MPI standard that MPICH still supports researchers today, including on our DeltaAI system at NCSA.”
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