Rabab Alomairy, MIT postdoc and CSAIL researcher at the Julia Lab, has received the Technical Community on High Performance Computing (TCHPC) Early Career Researchers Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing from IEEE’s Computer Society. The honor is a recognition of her efforts to show how supercomputers can turbocharge the efficiency of AI algorithms.
Alomairy specializes in high-performance computing (HPC), particularly how it can accelerate research in diverse fields such as material science, computational biology, climate science, and seismic inversion. Her research encompasses advanced numerical linear algebra, the design and optimization of scientific algorithms, the development of scalable software libraries, and task-based programming. She also applies her expertise in multicore and manycore architectures, as well as General-Purpose GPU (GPGPU) programming, to accelerate computations on modern supercomputing platforms.
For example, she and her colleagues revealed how NVIDIA's GH200 Superchips can power top-tier supercomputers to conduct large-scale genetic studies last year. Their software performed the largest multivariate genetic study yet, having been demonstrated on roughly 13 million synthetic patients. It could expand genome studies to the entire population of more than half of the world’s countries, and potentially help populations currently underrepresented in medical studies receive personalized medicine.
Alomairy also led the first Julia tutorial for productive HPC at the Supercomputing Conference, instructing visitors on how to use the programming language. Her work has also been scaled across the world’s leading supercomputers, including Fugaku and Frontier.
Her latest honor is also a milestone, as Alomairy is one of the youngest recipients of the Early Career Researchers Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing. “I’m honored to receive this prize,” says Alomairy. “It’s particularly special to me — over the past decade, this award has typically been granted to faculty or senior researchers, and I am the first to receive it as a postdoc at MIT. I hope this serves as a reminder that impact is not defined by title — ambition, dedication, and vision can be recognized at any stage.”
Her previous honors include being a two-time finalist for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize (one of which recognized her research on NVIDIA's GH200 Superchips), the Gauss Award, and the KAUST Research Excellence Award. She was also named a Rising Star in Computational and Data Sciences by the U.S. Department of Energy.
