OAK RIDGE, Tenn., June 25, 2018 – Arthur “Buddy” Bland, program director of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at the Department of Energy’s 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.
Bland was cited by Secretary of Energy 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 No. 1 in the TOP500 list released on Monday.
He 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 No. 1 TOP500 ranking. The OLCF, 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. 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," said ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia.
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.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy's Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://energy.gov/science/.