Devesh Tiwari named fifth recipient of the Jack Dongarra Early Career Award, with the committee citing production-deployed energy work and NISQ-era systems research.
The 2026 Jack Dongarra Early Career Award goes to Devesh Tiwari of Northeastern University, the first citation in the award's history to lead with sustainable computing and hybrid quantum-classical systems as primary contributions rather than adjacent interests. The committee's framing is the news: sustainability and post-Moore architectures are no longer the side-track at SC and ISC; they are the agenda.
Tiwari directs the Goodwill Computing Lab at Northeastern. The citation points to three SC24 results. Fugaku Points, an incentive-based power-efficiency mechanism, is running in production on Fugaku at RIKEN, with reported energy savings of 10.7% in the first round and 13.26% in the second; the work was led by his student Ana Luisa Solórzano. ECOLIFE applies carbon-aware scheduling to serverless workloads by mixing old and new hardware generations rather than retiring older silicon. LexiQL ran sentiment classification over movie reviews on IBM NISQ hardware, the first quantum NLP workload of its kind on that platform. The group landed four SC24 papers and two best-student-paper finalists.
Tiwari is the fifth recipient since the award was established. Torsten Hoefler took it in 2023 for performance modeling bridging HPC and AI; Amanda Randles and Edgar Solomonik shared it in 2024 for hemodynamics simulation and communication-avoiding tensor algorithms; Lin Gan was the 2025 recipient, recognized for scalable algorithms on Sunway. Each prior citation foregrounded performance and scale. Tiwari's foregrounds carbon and qubits.
Speaking to Northeastern earlier in 2025, Tiwari said: "Sustainability is something that will become more and more important. We really have to think about the next generation." Multi-megawatt sites and AI training power draw have made that a budget line, not a talking point. NISQ hardware has matured to the point where systems-level work like LexiQL and the earlier VERITAS output-estimation paper produces results worth deploying against, not just modeling.
Jack Dongarra will present the award in person on Wednesday, 24 June at 10:45 in the Congress Center Hamburg. The prize carries €5,000, sponsored by ISC Group. Selection was chaired by Prof. Michela Taufer of UT Knoxville. Tiwari will deliver the accompanying lecture immediately following the presentation, to be published in Future Generation Computer Systems.
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