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Awards and Recognition | Mathematics and Computer Science

Sheng Di receives 2019 IEEE-Chicago Distinguished Research and Development Award

Sheng Di, a computer scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science division of Argonne National Laboratory, has received the 2019 IEEE-Chicago Distinguished Research and Development Award. The award is given to IEEE members who have made significant progress in research and development in the past year. The award criteria are based mainly on published IEEE journal papers and IEEE conference papers and posters. 

Di has an exceptional record of achievement. During 2019 his work has been published in more than 10 top IEEE journal and conference papers, including several papers in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, three papers in SC19, and one paper in each of  2019 IEEE conferences on massive storage systems and technology, dependable systems and networks, and cluster computing.

Much of Di’s research has focused on data compression, which is becoming a critical tool for extreme-scale scientific simulations. Devising a series of optimizations, Di has significantly improved the compression quality, performance, and usability of the error-bounded lossy compressor SZ. Through his work Di has enabled SZ to support popular I/O libraries and to be widely used in multiple parallel environments by production-level applications such as cosmology and computational chemistry. He continues to pursue these efforts as a major participant in two activities supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Exascale Computing Project: VeloC/SZ and CODAR.

Today’s high-performance computing applications are producing extremely large amounts of data,” Di said.  Together with my colleagues, I am seeking ways to reduce the memory and storage space while accelerating the computation. IEEE provides numerous opportunities to share our accomplishments and to participate in discussions about scientific advances in the state of the art.”