PSC Powers Award-Winning Research at SC2003

PSC systems enabled research that garnered top prizes at the SC2003 conference in Arizona. PSC congratulates the researchers on this well-deserved recognition of their hard work.

The Gordon Bell Prize

The Gordon Bell Prizes are awarded each year at the annual SC conference to recognize outstanding achievement in the field of high performance computing. Established in 1988, the $5,000 prize is donated by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in computer architecture, parallel processing and high performance computing. The goal of the awards are to stimulate future advances of parallel computing applications by identifying major accomplishments and tracking progress over time.

Special Accomplishment Based on Innovation: Terascale forward and inverse earthquake modeling

Using sophisticated computational methods, these scientists have created realistic 3D models of earthquakes in geologically complex basins. Their objective is to provide accurate forecasts of earthquake ground motion as a necessary step toward creating building codes that provide for the safest possible structures at reasonable cost. They have carried out the most detailed, accurate simulations yet of the Northridge quake and also made major inroads on an important problem called “the inverse problem,” the goal of which is to determine subsurface geology by working backward from seismic measurements on the surface.

HPC Challenge

The HPC Challenge Awards honor participants in two categories for innovative uses of high performance computing resources.

Most Innovative Data-Intensive Application: TeraGyroid

The TeraGyroid project couples cutting-edge grid technologies, high-performance computing, visualization and computational steering capabilities to produce a major leap forward in soft condensed matter simulation. During SC2003, the largest Lattice Boltzmann simulation ever (1024³) was carried out on PSC’s TCS, interacting with smaller simulations at Daresbury Lab (512³) and 128³ lattices steered on a host of systems on the UK RealityGrid and on the US TeraGrid. Simulation checkpoints were migrated back and forth across the Atlantic at 300-400 Mbps. Collaborative computational steering and visualization was demonstrated, using the TeraGrid visualization cluster at ANL and SGI Onyx systems in Manchester and Phoenix.

Most Geographically Distributed Application: Global Analysis of Arthropod Evolution

A global team of researchers dynamically link a large number of high performance computers and networks across five continents to run fastDNAml, a parallel program for inference of phylogenetic relationships based on DNA sequences. They simultaneously demonstrate a global-scale distributed computing application and at the same time perform meaningful analysis of an important biological problem.

Best Paper Awards

The SC2003 Conference also selected several outstanding award winners for research papers presented during the meeting.

Best Student Paper

The Best Student Paper award went to: "A New Parallel Kernel-Independent Fast Multipole Method" by Lexing Ying, George Biros, Denis Zorin, and Harper Langston (New York University). It presented a new adaptive fast multipole algorithm and its parallel implementation, which was tested on up to 3000 processors of LeMieux at PSC. The authors were thus able to solve viscuous flow problems with up to 2.1 billion unknowns, reaching 1.6 Tflops in certain parts of the computation, and a sustained rate of 1.13 Tflops. This paper was also a finalist for the Gordon Bell prize.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with the Westinghouse Electric Company. It was established in 1986 and is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry.

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