SMU chemistry professor awarded Wilkinson Prize for innovative software in scientific computing

DALLAS (SMU) – Devin Matthews, an assistant professor of chemistry at SMU, has been awarded the 2023 James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software.

The award is given by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) every four years to recognize researchers in the early stages of their careers who have created an outstanding piece of numerical software, or to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to an existing piece of numerical software.

Matthews and Field G. Van Zee, a researcher and software scientist in the Science of High-Performance Computing at the University of Texas at Austin, won the award for their development of BLIS (BLAS-like Library Instantiation Software). The portable open-source software framework facilitates rapid instantiation of high-performance Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) functionality. 

In an interview appearing in SIAM News, Matthews and Van Zee explain how BLIS works and why this is such a big help for scientists – like chemists and data scientists – doing research using high-performance computers. Matthews’ research interests include computational chemistry, quantum mechanics and computational spectroscopy.

The Wilkinson Prize will be given later this month at the 2023 SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering in the Netherlands. Matthews, who joined SMU in 2018, will also deliver a keynote speech.

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