Sherry Li, a senior scientist and group lead in Berkeley Lab’s Applied Math and Computational Research Division, is co-author on a paper being honored with the 2022 SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing Best Paper Prize.

The award will be presented at the SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP22), to be held virtually February 23-26, 2022. The prize was awarded to Li and co-authors Piyush Sao of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Richard Vuduc of the Georgia Institute of Technology for their paper “A communication-avoiding 3D algorithm for sparse LU factorization on heterogeneous systems.” Read more in this Q&A with the authors.

Li, Sao, and Vuduc will give a talk on their work at the PP22 conference on February 25, 8:30 a.m. PT.

“It is a truly humbling honor to be recognized by this prize,” said Li. “We are grateful for receiving long-time support from the ASCR office through the SciDAC program and, more recently, the Exascale Computing Project. This enabled us to continue developing novel algorithms and software that are tracking the computer architecture trends and application needs.”

Li is a 2016 SIAM Fellow who has worked on diverse problems in high-performance scientific computations, including parallel computing, sparse matrix computations, high precision arithmetic, and combinatorial scientific computing. She is also lead developer of SuperLU, a widely used sparse direct solver, and has contributed to the development of several other mathematical libraries, including ARPREC, LAPACK, PDSLin, STRUMPACK, and XBLAS.

The SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing awards the best paper prize every two years to the author(s) of the most outstanding paper in the field of parallel scientific and engineering computing published within the four calendar years preceding the award year.

About Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab

High performance computing plays a critical role in scientific discovery. Researchers increasingly rely on advances in computer science, mathematics, computational science, data science, and large-scale computing and networking to increase our understanding of ourselves, our planet, and our universe. Berkeley Lab's Computing Sciences Area researches, develops, and deploys new foundations, tools, and technologies to meet these needs and to advance research across a broad range of scientific disciplines.





Last edited: September 17, 2025