The Turing Award is widely considered by many as the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in computing and Google has just increased the cash prize for the award to $1 million. This amount is now four times larger than the previous cash award.

Since 1966, the Association for Computing Machinery selects the winners for this prestigious award. The latest recipient of this award is Leslie Lamport who was recognized for his efforts in organizing chaotic data by distributed computing systems. Lamport is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research.

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Lamport originated many of the key concepts of distributed and concurrent computing, including causality and logical clocks, replicated state machines, and sequential consistency. His contributions have a common theme: to impose clear and well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of a collection of distributed processes.

According to Alexander Wolf, president of the ACM, the Turing Award is currently at par with other global cultural and scientific awards. With the support from Google, this recognition celebrates the role of computing as it transforms global communications and businesses.

The Nobel Prize is worth eight million Swedish Krona or roughly a little over $1 million.

The next Turing Award will hand out Google's $1 million cash prize and will be announced in the spring of 2015.

This award will be given to the individual that contributed to the greatest advance in computing technology in 2014. This cash prize was also increased due to the omnipresent role of computing and communications in daily life.

Since 2007, the original cash award of $250,000 has been sponsored by Google and giant computer manufacturer Intel. The hardware maker just recently decided to back out from this award sponsorship leaving Google its primary sponsor.

Google is definitely proud to support people that make fundamental contributions to computer science and help ACM to raise awareness about these innovators, said Stuart Feldman, Google's vice president of engineering.

Alan Turing was born in England in 1912. He was a pioneer of early age computers and envisioned artificial intelligence, computer programs, encryption and even mobile devices.

Turing was a mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, pioneering computer scientist and mathematical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science and invented the "Turing machine," which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer.

He is widely considered the "Father of Theoretical Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence."

After World War II, he was persecuted for being a homosexual and committed suicide in 1954. A posthumous pardon in 2013 was granted to Turing by the Queen of England.

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