The 2020 recipient of the IEEE Boston Section’s “Distinguished Service Award” (DSA) is Dr. Albert Reuther. The DSA is awarded to an IEEE Boston Section volunteer who is active in our section, chapter, or conference efforts. Specifically, the DSA honors an IEEE Boston Section member who has made exceptional and distinguished contributions to the Boston IEEE Section. Dr. Reuther received the award for his extraordinary efforts on the section’s High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC) Committee in 2020. His citation reads, “For Continuous and dedicated support of the section’s HPEC Conference and extraordinary effort virtualizing HPEC 2020 in response to the global pandemic”.

Dr. Albert Reuther is Senior Technical Staff Member in the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center (LLSC). He brought supercomputing to Lincoln Laboratory through the establishment of LLGrid, founded the LLSC, and leads the LLSC Computational Science and Engineering team. He developed the gridMatlab high-performance computing (HPC) cluster toolbox for pMatlab and is the computer system architect of the MIT Supercloud and numerous interactive supercomputing clusters based on Supercloud, including those in the LLSC. He is the technical chair of the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference and has organized numerous workshops on interactive HPC, cloud HPC, economics of HPC, and HPC security. His areas of research include interactive HPC; computer architectures for machine learning, graph analytics, and parallel signal processing; and computational engineering. Dr. Reuther earned PhD degree in electrical and computer engineering in 2000 from Purdue University and an MBA degree from the Collège des Ingénieurs in Paris, France, and Stuttgart, Germany in 2001.

In addition to the DSA, the section has two other awards for which qualified section members can also be nominated. They are, “Student Achievement Award” – to recognize a college student who demonstrates the potential to become a distinguished leader and outstanding contributor in an IEEE field of interest, and the, “Distinguished Member Award” which recognizes outstanding long-term service (10-years or more) to the Boston Section of the IEEE and significant contributions in an IEEE field of interest.