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The Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

James Wilkinson

In honour of the outstanding contributions of James Hardy Wilkinson to the field of numerical software, Argonne National Laboratory, the National Physical Laboratory, and the Numerical Algorithms Group award a numerical software prize of US $3000.

The Wilkinson Prize 2011

The Wilkinson prize will be awarded at ICIAM 2011 in Vancouver, July 18-22, 2011.

2011 prize entry details

Rules for Submission

Each author of an entry must be under 40 years of age on January 1, 2010. Each entry must contain the following:

  • Software written in a widely available high-level programming language.
  • A (two page) summary of the main features of the algorithm and software implementation.
  • A paper describing the algorithm and the software implementation. The paper should give an analysis of the algorithm and indicate any special programming features.
  • Documentation of the software which describes its purpose and method of use.
  • Examples of use of the software, including a test program and data.

Submissions must be in English. Entries must be received by Sepember 1, 2010.

Selection Criteria

The award will be made by the evaluation board to the entry that best addresses all phases of the preparation of high-quality numerical software, including

  • clarity of the paper and of the software implementation and documentation;
  • importance of application addressed by the software;
  • portability, reliability, efficiency and usability of the software implementation;
  • depth of analysis of the algorithm and the software;
  • quality of the test software.

Submissions

Each submission should be in the form of a gzipped, tar archive. Submissions should include a README file describing the contents of the archive and scripts for executing the test programs. Submissions can be sent by email to wilkinson-prize@mcs.anl.gov. Contact wilkinson-prize@mcs.anl.gov for further information

2007 Wilkinson Prize

The 2007 Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software was awarded to Wolfgang Bangerth of Texas A&M University, Ralf Hartmann of DLR Germany and Guido Kanschat of Texas A&M University for the software package ‘deal.II’.

deal.II is a C++ program library targeted at adaptive finite elements and error estimation. It uses state-of-the-art programming techniques of the C++ programming language to offer you a modern interface to the complex data structures and algorithms required for adaptivity and enables you to use a variety of finite elements in one, two, and three space dimensions, as well as time-dependent problems.

To find out more about deal.II, go to http://www.dealii.org/

Previous Prize winners:

  • The 2003 prize was awarded to Jonathan Shewchuch for 'Triangle' (ICIAM 03)
  • The 1999 prize was awarded to Matteo Frigo and Steven Johnson for FFTW (ICIAM 99).
  • The 1995 prize was awarded to Chris Bischof and Alan Carle for ADIFOR 2.0 (ICIAM 95).
  • The 1991 prize was awarded to Linda Petzold for DASSL at the International Conference in Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM 91).

Contact us for further information:

Mrs Katie O'Hare
Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd.
Wilkinson House
Jordan Hill Road
Oxford OX2 8DR
United Kingdom
Email: nagmarketing@nag.co.uk