Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello, developers of the Car Parrinello Molecular
Dynamics (CPMD) approach, are joint recipients of the IEEE
Computer Society's 2009 Sidney Fernbach Award.
The pair laid the foundation for a modern approach to the chemistry and physics
of materials. Their methodology was revolutionary, increasing the speed of simulations
and propelling a major force in science. Such simulations are now used in physics,
materials science, chemistry, semiconductors, surface science, catalysis, biological
processes, mineralogy, and the new field of nano-sized structures, including
industrial applications.
"The Fernbach Award recognizes the leadership of doctors Car and Parrinello
in creating the modern theoretical and practical foundations for materials modeling,"
said IEEE Computer Society President Susan K. (Kathy) Land.
The approach to molecular dynamics calculations and density functional theory
that they developed increased the speed of materials simulations and shifted
models from analysis of small systems with the capacity to understand deeper
and more complex processes.
CPMD has become the leading code in high-performance computing usage. The algorithm
is a breakthrough in computer simulation that is at the root of other combined
quantum/classical simulations, unifying two separate scientific communities;
classical computer simulations and electronic structure calculations.
"Simply put, the Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics (CPMD) approach is
a one of the key enablers of complex materials modeling and a workhorse of computational
science," said Fernbach Award Selection Committee Chair Daniel Reed.
Car and Parrinello are set to receive their award and deliver a plenary speech
at 11:15 a.m. on Wednesday, 17 November at SC09 (http://sc09.supercomputing.org/)
in Portland, Oregon.
Car is the Ralph W. Dornte 31 Professor in Chemistry at Princeton University.
He is a Fellow of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science (PCTS), and is
affiliated with the Department of Physics, the Princeton Institute for the Science
and Technology of Materials (PRISM), and the Program in Computational and Applied
Mathematics (PACM).
He received a doctorate in physics from the Milan Institute of Technology.
Before joining Princeton University in 1999, he worked at the University of
Milan, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the IBM T.J. Watson Research
Center, the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, and the University
of Geneva.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Royal Society of
Chemistry (UK), a recipient of an honorary doctorate, and was awarded the 2009
Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, the Raman Prize
for Computational Physics from the American Physical Society in 1995, and the
Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Solid State
Physics from the European Physical Society in 1990. In 2008, he received a Humboldt
Foundation research award for senior US scientists.
His research has focused on understanding the physical and chemical properties
of matter in condensed and molecular phases using computational methods based
on first-principles microscopic quantum theory.
Parrinello has been professor of computational science at ETH Zurich since
2001 and for part of this time was also director of the Swiss Center for Scientific
Computing (CSCS) in Manno, Switzerland. Prior to joining ETH, he was director
at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany;
manager at the IBM Research Laboratory in Zurich; and professor at SISSA in
Trieste, Italy.
Parrinello's scientific interests include the study of complex chemical reactions,
hydrogen-bonded systems, catalysis, materials science and large-scale motion
in proteins.
He holds five honorary doctorates and received the 2009 Dirac Medal of the
International Centre for Theoretical Physics, the 2006 Somaini prize of the
Italian Physical Society, the 2001 American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical
Chemistry, the 1995 Raman prize, and the 1990 Europhysics prize.
He is a member of the Royal Society (UK), the Accademia dei Lincei (Italy),
the Max Planck Institute (Germany), the American Physical Society, the International
Academy of Quantum Molecular Science, and the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie
der Wissenschaften.
Established in 1992 in memory of high-performance computing pioneer Sidney
Fernbach, the award recognizes innovative approaches to HPC applications. It
acknowledges outstanding contributions in developing numerical algorithms and
mathematical software that are important for computational modeling and simulation,
or for using high-performance computers to solve large computational problems.
William Gropp, a developer of the message passing interface, was the 2008 winner
of the Fernbach Award. Previous Sidney Fernbach Award recipients include Edward
Seidel, John B. Bell, Marsha Berger, and Jack J. Dongarra.
About the Computer Society With nearly 85,000 members, the IEEE Computer Society
is the world's leading organization of computing professionals. Founded in 1946,
and the largest of the 39 societies of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE), the Computer Society is dedicated to advancing the theory
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The Computer Society serves the information and career-development needs of
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CS Digital Library (CSDL) is an excellent research tool, containing more than
250,000 articles from 1,600 conference proceedings and 26 CS periodicals going
back to 1988.
Posted October 23rd, 2009
