A cash award of $10,000 (since 2011) accompanies the recognition, funded by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing.
The Prizes were preceded by a nominal prize ($100) established by Alan Karp, a numerical analyst (then of IBM) who challenged claims of MIMD performance improvements proposed in the Letters to the Editor section of the Communications of the ACM.
Individuals or teams may apply for the award by submitting a technical paper describing their work through the SC conference submissions process.
According to current policies, the Prize can be awarded in one or more of the following categories, depending on the entries received in a given year: Peak Performance: If the entry demonstrates outstanding performance in terms of floating point operations per second on an important science/engineering problem; the efficiency of the application in using bottleneck resources (such as memory size or bandwidth) is also taken into consideration.
Special Achievement in Scalability, Special Achievement in Time to Solution: If the entry demonstrates exceptional Scalability, in terms of both strong and weak scaling, and/or total time to solve an important science/engineering problem.