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. [Read more…]