ORNL’s Bland receives DOE Secretary’s Appreciation Award for computing leadership

Arthur “Buddy” Bland, program director of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has received the Secretary’s Appreciation Award for his nearly four decades of achievements in providing high-performance computing resources for science, a press release said.

Bland was cited by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry for his work “in recognition of nearly 40 years of leadership in delivering high-performance computing resources to address the nation’s science and engineering challenges across a wide array of disciplines and for critical contributions to the success of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and sustained U.S. leadership in high-performance computing and computational science.”

Bland led the project to deliver the Summit supercomputer, launched June 8 at ORNL as “the world’s most powerful and smartest supercomputer” with a peak performance capability of 200 petaflops, or 200,000 trillion calculations per second. Summit was listed number one in the TOP500 list released on Monday.

Bland also worked with the previously-ranked top supercomputer Titan, and with Jaguar, which was the first unclassified computer system in the United States to achieve the number one TOP500 ranking. The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility—which has been home to Summit, Titan, and Jaguar—is a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

“Buddy is responsible for bringing up every high-performance computing system at ORNL during the past quarter century, starting with Paragon in the 1990s,” said ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia. “He has been foundational to the establishment and success of ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences, as well as the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, and this recognition from Secretary Perry is most richly deserved.”

Bland, a former U.S. Air Force captain, received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from the University of Southern Mississippi.

More information will be added as it becomes available.

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