Jack Dangara is an American computer scientist who is celebrated for his pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and high-performance computing.

He developed essential software libraries like Lin-Pack and LawPack, which are widely used for solving linear algebra problems on advanced computing systems.

Dangara is also a co-creator of the Top 500 list, which ranks the world's most

powerful supercomputers. His work has profoundly impacted computational science, enabling advancements

across numerous research domains. Jack received the 2021 Turing Award for, quote, pioneering

contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries that enable high-performance

computational software to keep pace with exponential hardware improvements for over four decades.

He joins the podcast with Sean Falconer to talk about his life and career.

This episode is hosted by Sean Falconer.

Check the show notes for more information on Sean's work and where to find him.

Jack, welcome to show. Yeah, thanks very much. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

Yeah, thanks so much for being here.

So you've spent a lot of your career working on high performance computing.

So first of all, and maybe it seems like a basic question, but I think it's probably a good spot to start is what defines high performance computing?

And is that a moving target as mainstream computers that we use every day

become more powerful over time?

Well, that's exactly right.

So high performance computing, or I would call supercomputers,

are usually specified as the fastest computers at any time.

So there's the marker as time.

As time goes on, these computers change, of course,

and they get faster. And things that were supercomputers, let's say three or five years ago

...