Awards and Prizes
Click here (http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2003/nr_finalbwc.html)
for an announcement of winners of the 2003 Bandwidth Challenge.
Top Researchers, Accomplishments in High Performance Computing
Honored at SC2003 Gordon Bell Prizes, IEEE Awards, HPC Challenges,
Best Papers and Poster Winners Announced
Top researchers and their unprecedented accomplishments
in high performance computing were recognized at the SC2003
conference this week, where the winners of the Gordon Bell
Prizes, the HPC Challenge, and the best research papers and
poster were announced. SC2003, the annual conference of high
performance computing was held from November 15-21 in the
Phoenix Convention Center with the theme "Igniting Innovation."
Every year, SC2003 presents a wide range of awards that recognize
the innovative work of conference participants and leaders
in the field. The conference itself gives awards for Best
Paper, Best Student Paper, Best Poster, and the HPC Challenge
and Bandwidth Challenge. In addition, SC2003 serves as the venue for presenting
the Gordon Bell Prizes, which reward practical uses of high-performance computers,
including best performance of an application and best achievement in cost-performance.
Additionally, two special awards are presented by the Institute for Electrical
and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) to recognize longtime innovators in high-performance
computing.
The 2003 IEEE Seymour Cray Award was presented to Burton
J. Smith, chief scientist for Cray Inc. The Seymour Cray
Award honors individuals whose innovative contributions
to high performance computing systems best exemplify the creative spirit demonstrated
by Seymour Cray. Smith is a co-founder of Cray Inc. and has been chief scientist
and a director since early 1988. He is a recognized authority on high performance
computer architecture and programming languages for parallel computers. He
is the principal architect of the MTA system and heads Cray's Cascade project.
Smith was honored in 1990 with the Eckert-Mauchly Award given jointly by the
IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery, and was elected a fellow
of both organizations in 1994. In February 2003 he was also elected as a member
of the National Academy of Engineering.
The IEEE's 2003 Sidney Fernbach Award as presented to Jack
Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee and
adjunct R&D participant at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory and adjunct professor at Rice University. The award, established
in 1992 in memory of Sidney Fernbach, one of the pioneers in the development
and application of high performance computers, is awarded for outstanding contributions
in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches.
Dongarra, who is well-known for his work with the twice-yearly ranking of the
world's Top 500 supercomputers, specializes in numerical algorithms in linear
algebra, parallel computing, use of advanced-computer architectures, programming
methodology, and tools for parallel computers. His research includes the development,
testing and documentation of high quality mathematical software. He has contributed
to the design and implementation of the following open source software packages
and systems: EISPACK, LINPACK, the BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, Netlib, PVM, MPI,
NetSolve, and ATLAS.
The Gordon Bell Prizes are traditionally granted in three
categories: special accomplishment based on innovation;
peak performance based on operations per second; and a
price per performance ratio measured in megaflop/s per
dollar. Winners depend on the entries received; in some
years a prize is not awarded in a given category. This
year's Gordon Bell Prizes were for:
Peak Performance: "A 14.6 Billion Degrees of Freedom, 5 Teraflop/s, 2.5
Terabyte Earthquake Simulation on the Earth Simulator." Authors: Dimitri
Komatitsch, Chen Ji, and Jeroen Tromp (California Institute of Technology);
and Seiji Tsuboi (Institute for Frontier Research on Earth Evolution, JAMSTEC).
The researchers used 1,944 processors of the Earth Simulator to model seismic
wave propagation resulting from large earthquakes. The model, based on a very
high-resolution mesh, incorporates wave speed and density structure, three-dimensional
wave-speed and density structure, ellipticity, topography, and bathymetry.
Special Achievement: "High Resolution Forward and Inverse Earthquake Modeling
on Terascale Computers." Authors: Volkan Akcelik, Jacobo Bielak, Ioannis
Epanomeritakis, Antonio Fernandez, Omar Ghattas, Eui Joong Kim, Julio Lopez,
David O'Hallaron, and Tiankai Tu (Carnegie Mellon University); George Biros
(Courant Institute, New York University); and John Urbanic (Pittsburgh Supercomputing
Center). For earthquake simulations to play an important role in the reduction
of seismic risk, they must be capable of high resolution and high fidelity.
The researchers developed earthquake simulation algorithms and tools and
used them to carry out simulations of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in the
Los Angeles Basin using 100 million grid points.
Special Achievement ("lifetime"): "Performance Evaluation and
Tuning of GRAPE-6—Towards 40 'Real' Tflop/s." Authors: Junichiro
Makino and Hiroshi Daisaka (Department of Astronomy, School of Science, University
of Tokyo); Eiichiro Kokubo (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan);
and Toshiyuki Fukushige (Department of General System Studies, College of
Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo). The researchers benchmarked GRAPE-6,
a sixth-generation special-purpose computer for gravitational many-body problems,
and presented the measured performance for a few real applications with a
top speed of 35.3 teraflops.
The SC2002 Conference also selected several outstanding award
winners for research papers and activities presented during
the meeting.
Best Paper Award: "The Case of the Missing Supercomputer Performance:
Achieving Optimal Performance on the 8,192 Processors of ASCI Q." Authors:
Fabrizio Petrini, Darren Kerbyson, and Scott Pakin (Los Alamos National Laboratory).
The researchers described how they improved the effective performance of ASCI
Q, the world's second-fastest supercomputer. Using an arsenal of performance-analysis
techniques including analytical models, custom microbenchmarks, full applications,
and simulators, they succeeded in observing, identifying, and eliminating a
serious—but previously undetected—performance problem.
Best Student Paper: "A New Parallel Kernel-Independent Fast Multipole
Method." Authors: Lexing Ying, George Biros, Denis Zorin, and Harper
Langston (New York University).
Best Poster: "Improving the Performance of MPI Derived Datatypes by Optimizing
Memory-Access Cost." Authors: Surendra Byna and Xian-He Sun (Illinois
Institute of Technology, Chicago); William Gropp and Rajeev Thakur (Argonne
National Laboratory).
The HPC Challenge Awards recognize participants in two categories
for innovative uses of high performance computing resources.
Those included:
The HPC Challenge Award for the Most
Geographically Distributed Application: "Global
Analysis of Arthropod Evolution," by Craig Stewart (UITS, Indiana
University), John Colbourne (Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, Indiana
University) and their team.
The HPC Challenge Award for Most Innovative Data-Intensive Application: "Transcontinental
RealityGrids for Interactive Collaborative Exploration of Parameter Space (TRICEPS)," by
Stephen Pickles (University of Manchester), Peter Coveney (University College
London) and their team.
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