LLNL’s Doerfert awarded IEEE Computer Society Early Career Researchers Award

The IEEE Computer Society on Nov. 16 presented Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)’s Johannes Doerfert with its IEEE-CS Technical Community on High Performance Computing (TCHPC) Early Career Researchers Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing.

Doerfert, a computer scientist in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at LLNL, was one of three researchers awarded the honor at the 2023 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC23) in Denver. The TCHPC Award recognizes individuals who “have made outstanding, influential and potentially long-lasting contributions in the field of high-performance computing” within five years of obtaining their Ph.D. degrees as of Jan. 1 the year of the award, according to IEEE-CS.

“At the end of the day, what I feel is most important for me is that I work in a very downstream world that isn’t very user-facing,” Doerfert said. “Being recognized as having an impact in HPC is really nice, because it's hard for me to see my impact. I never consider myself an HPC person, so this kind of recognition in the field — as someone that is very low-level and production-oriented — is fantastic.”

Doerfert received his Ph.D. in computer science from Germany’s Saarland University in 2018 and worked at Argonne National Laboratory before joining LLNL in 2022. Possessing a research interest in new and exciting uses for compiler technologies, Doerfert received a Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Research Project grant and a Better Scientific Software fellowship.

Doerfert has been involved in the open source LLVM compiler framework since 2014, where he is the code owner for OpenMP offload. During the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), Doerfert worked on three subprojects — PROTEAS-TUNE, SOLLVE and Flang —combining his compiler and OpenMP expertise to deliver portable exascale performance via open source software.

His goal is to help people exploit hardware to the fullest without requiring them to become experts in the hardware or the software stack, including programming languages. To this end, he develops tools and compiler enhancements that simplify the tedious task of writing portable high performance software.

Doerfert’s work is co-funded by DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program and the National Nuclear Security Administration.