Dharmendra S. Modha

My Work and Thoughts.

Archives for 2009

ACM Gordon Bell Prize for “The Cat is Out of the Bag”

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Today, at the Supercomputing 2009 conference in Portland, Oregon, our paper “The Cat is Out of the Bag” was awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize.

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize has been awarded since 1987 to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing. It is now administered by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), with financial support for the stipend provided by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing.

The purpose of the prize is to track the progress of leading-edge technical computing, namely simulation, modeling and large-scale data analysis as applied to science, engineering or other fields. In addition to the main ACM Gordon Bell Prize, the Bell Prize Committee may, at its discretion, grant a special award to recognize an achievement in a related area such as price/performance, usage of innovative techniques or non-traditional types of computation.

From left to right: Steven K. Esser, Horst D. Simon, Dharmendra S. Modha,
Mateo Valero (Chair, Gordon Bell Prize Committee), Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan

Subramanian (Subu) Iyer

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I had tremendous good fortune to spend time with Dr. Subu Iyer. He is one of the driving forces behind IBM’s technological leadership in EDRAM.

Biography: Subramanian S. Iyer is Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technologist for the Semiconductor Research and Development Center, IBM Systems & Technology Group, and is responsible for setting semiconductor technology direction. Till recently he was Director of 45nm CMOS Development. He obtained his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles. He joined the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in 1981 and was manager of the Exploratory Structures and Devices Group till 1994, when he founded SiBond LLC to develop and manufacture Silicon-on-insulator materials. He has been with the IBM Microelectronics Division since 1997. His current technical interests and work lie in the area of 3-dimensional integration for memory sub-systems and the semiconductor roadmap at 22nm and beyond. He has served as an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, NY. Dr. Iyer is a Fellow of IEEE and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE and Chair of the mid-Hudson chapter of the Electron Device Scoiety.

A History of Nobel Prizes in Nerve Signaling

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William Risk pointed out the following extremely interesting page that aummarizes the work of several Nobel-prize winning researches:

Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1906)
Charles Sherrington and Edgar Adrian (1932)
Sir Henry Dale and Otto Loewi (1936)
Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Gasser (1944)
Alan Hodgkin, Andrew Huxley and Sir John Eccles (1963)
Sir Bernard Katz, Ulf von Euler and Julius Axelrod (1970)
Stanley Cohen and Rita Levi-Montalcini (1986)
Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann (1991)
Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel (2000)