The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society has presented Xian-He Sun with a Golden Core Award for his service in helping to make the society a preeminent group for computer professionals.

Sun is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Illinois Tech. The director of the Scalable Computing Software (SCS) laboratory, he also is a guest faculty member in the Division of Mathematics and Computer Science at Argonne National Laboratory.

Sun has been an IEEE Fellow since 2012, when he was honored for his contributions to memory-bounded performance metrics and scalable parallel computing. Among other things, he co-developed Sun-Ni’s Law, one of three scalable computing laws along with Amdahl’s law and Gustafson’s law, and Concurrent Average Memory Access Time (C-AMAT), a mathematical model to address the memory-wall problem.

For the IEEE Computer Society, he has been a distinguished speaker; vice chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing; member of the IEEE Fellow Evaluation Committee; chair of the IEEE/ACM Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium; co-chair of the IEEE/ACM Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing conference; editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems; and more.

He is also a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Sun researches parallel and distributed processing, memory and I/O systems, software systems for Big Data applications, and performance evaluation and optimization. He has over 250 publications and five patents in these areas. He has been an editor of eight international professional journals.

Before Illinois Tech, Sun was an associate professor and director of the Scalable Computing Laboratory at Louisiana State University – Baton Rouge. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Ames National Laboratory; a staff scientist at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (ICASE), NASA Langley Research Center; and an American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) fellow at the U.S. Navy Research Laboratories.