Awards Received by PSC Users and Staff

2005

    HPC Analytics Challenge Award

  • SPICE (Simulated Pore Interactive Computing Environment), a project led by Peter Coveney, University of London, with PSC's Sergiu Sanielevici as a co-author, won the HPC Analytics Challenge award, a first-time SC award given for innovative techniques in rigorous data analysis, advanced networks and high-end visualization to solve a complex, real-world problem.

2004

    HPCWire Reader's Choice Awards

    Most Innovative Implementation
    Most Innovative HPC Technology
    Most Important Emerging Technology

  • PSC's newest system, based on Sandia National Lab's "Red Storm" design (now designated "XT3" by Cray) won three HPCWire Reader's Choice Awards: for Most Innovative Implementation; for Most Innovative HPC Technology; and for Most Important Emerging Technology.

2003

    Gordon Bell Prize for High Performance Computing

    SC2003 Special Accomplishment Based on Innovation


  • The "Quake Group", led by Jacobo Bielak, Omar Ghattas, and David O'Hallaron of CMU and George Biros of the University of Pennsylvania won the both the Gordon Bell prize for High Performance Computing and the SC2003 Award for Special Accomplishment Based on Innovation for developing earthquake simulations on the TCS that play an important role in reducing seismic risk. Other group members include Volkan Akcelik, Ioannis Epanomeritakis, Antonio Fernandez, Eui Joong Kim, Julio Lopez, and Tiankai Tu of Carnegie Mellon, and Greg Foss and John Urbanic of PSC.

    • SC2003 HPC Challenge

    Most Innovative Data-Intensive Application

  • The TeraGyroid project, led by Peter Coveney, University of London, and Bruce Boghosian, Tufts University, coupled 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.

    • SC2003 Best Student Paper

  • "A New Parallel Kernel-Independent Fast Multipole Method" by Lexing Ying, George Biros, Denis Zorin, and Harper Langston (New York University) 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 solved viscous 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.

    • Computerworld Honors

    21st Century Achievement Award Finalist

  • PSC was one of five finalists for the Computerworld Honors 21st Century Achievement Award. PSC was honored for "using information technology to make great strides toward remarkable social achievement in Science," according to Daniel Morrow, Executive Director of the Computerworld Honors Program.

2002

    Gordon Bell Award for Special Accomplishment

  • James C. Phillips, Gengbin Zheng, Sameer Kumar, and Laxmikant V. Kale, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, won the Gordon Bell Award for Special Accomplishment for their work on NAMD. NAMD maps the structure of large biological molecules and molecular systems. Using PSC's Lemieux system, NAMD scaled effectively and efficiently to over 2,000 processors.

    • SC2002 Best Technical Paper

  • Volkan Akcelik of Carnegie Mellon, George Biros of New York University, and Omar Ghattas of Carnegie Mellon, won the award for Best Technical Paper at SC2002. Using PSC's Lemieux, they built on large-scale earthquake simulation work done previously at PSC.

    • SC2002

    Bandwidth Challenge
    SC2002 High Performance Computing Challenge

  • LeMieux also participated in projects at SC2002 that received the "Bandwidth Challenge Award" and the "High Performance Computing Challenge Awards" for "the most geographically distributed application" and for "the most heterogeneous set of platforms."

1999

    Computerworld Smithsonian Award in Science Finalist

  • Peter Kollman and Yong Duan of the University of California, San Francisco, were finalists in the CWSA in Science for their simulation of the folding action of a protein. Their 1 microsecond simulation, 100 times longer than any before, offers new insights into the folding process and could lead to more effective drugs for diseases believed to be caused by malfunctions in protein folding.

    • SC1999 High-Performance Computing Award

  • An intercontinental team consisting of computational scientists, networking and systems specialists in Stuttgart (Germany), Manchester (UK), Pittsburgh (USA) and Tsukuba (Japan) won top prize for the most challenging scientific application in the HPC Games at SC1999. The molecular dynamics simulation with over two million particles ran concurrently on a Hitachi SR8000 at ETL (Tsukuba), and on CRAY T3Es at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, CSAR (Manchester) and HLRS (Stuttgart).

1998

    Gordon Bell Prize

    Yang Wang of the PSC collaborated with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Energy Research Supercomputing Center and the University of Bristol, UK, to win the Gordon Bell Prize for Best Achievement in High-Performance Computing at SC1998. Their first-principles simulation of complex magnetic properties is the world's first fully fledged scientific application to sustain more than one Teraflop. This was accomplished on a 1480-processor T3E-1200 system at Cray Research.

    SC1998 Most Insightful Application

  • A group of researchers including PSC's Greg Hood and others from Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), Princeton University, the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and other PSC staff won the Most Insightful Application award at SC1998. They linked an MRI scanner at UPMC with PSC's CRAY T3E over high-speed networks. A series of complex data manipulations converted raw MRI data to 3-D images of the MRI subject's brain, which were then transmitted and displayed on a visualization screen at a remote site, in this case the show floor at Orlando. Typically for this kind of research — known as “functional MRI” — it takes a day or more to produce 3-D images; the Pittsburgh team cut the delay to seconds.

1997

1996

    Computerworld Smithsonian Award in Science

  • The Center for Light Microscope Imaging and Biotechnology, a National Science Foundation science and technology center based at Carnegie Mellon University, won the 1996 CWSA in Science for developing automated light microscope technology to observe the dynamics of living cells.

    • Fernbach Award

  • Gary Glatzmaier of the Los Alamos National Laboratory was awarded the Fernbach Award for the first three-dimensional computer simulation of how the Earth's magnetic field is generated and how it occasionally reverses its direction. The work required 5,000 hours of computing time to simulate 80,000 years of geodynamic history, providing insights into the nature of the Earth's magnetic field.

    • Computerworld Smithsonian Award Finalists

  • Three of the four finalists in addition to the Center for Light Microscope Imaging and Biotechnology (see above) in the Science category of the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards were also collaborations with PSC.

      At Carnegie Mellon University, Ted Russell and colleague Greg McRae, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used PSC's Cray C90 to demonstrate that smog reduction strategies can be improved through selective control of nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons, produced from automobile emissions and many other manmade sources.

      Gary Glatzmaier of the Los Alamos National Laboratory was a CWSA finalist for his research into how the Earth's magnetic field is generated and how it occasionally reverses its direction. This same research garnered him the 1996 Fernbach award.

      Scientists at California Institute of Technology's Scalable Concurrent Programming Laboratory, used PSC's CRAY T3D to simulate the aerodynamics of the Delta II satellite launch vehicle. The simulations lower the cost of space operations by providing a means of identifying flaws that cannot be traced through existing test procedures.

    • SC1996 High-Performance Computing Challenge

  • A collaborative effort among three of the nation's leading computational research centers won a Gold Medal in the Concurrency category of the High Performance Computing Challenge at Supercomputing '96. A team of physicists, software developers and networking experts from Oak Ridge National Labs, Sandia National Labs and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center linked disparate, highly parallel computing systems at their respective sites. They applied this "metacomputing" approach to a large-scale materials science computation. The HPC Challenge judges cited them for demonstrating the ability to solve significant problems using diverse systems linked over high-speed networks.

1995

1994

    Computerworld Smithsonian Award for Breakthrough Computational Science

  • The CWSA for Breakthrough Computational Science was awarded to researchers Charles Peskin and David McQueen of the New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences for development of a three-dimensional computational model of blood flow in the heart, its nearby valves and major vessels.

    • Fernbach Award

  • Charles Peskin of the New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences for his research on blood flow in the heart.

    • DISCOVER Magazine Computer Software Award Finalist

  • University of Pittsburgh biologist John Rosenberg was a finalist for the DISCOVER Magazine Award for Technological Innovation in Computer Software for his research at PSC into the biological process by which proteins recognize and attach to the correct spot on a DNA strand.

1993

    Computerworld Smithsonian Award in Science

    The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center itself was the recipient of the CWSA in Science for its efforts to bring high-performance computing to bear on research that improves the quality of human life. The award cited the center's involvment in important biomedical research on interactions between proteins and DNA.

    Computers and Thought Award

  • Hiroaki Kitano, of Carnegie Mellon University's Center for Machine Translation and the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Japan, received the most prestigious award in artificial intelligence for researchers under 35, the Computers and Thought Award. This award, given by the International Joint Conferences for Artificial Intelligence, honors Kitano's work in simultaneous language translation programs.

    • SC1993 Most Hetereogenous

  • A distributed volume-rendering application developed by Joel Welling, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center scientific visualization specialist, was named Most Heterogeneous Application at the Supercomputing '93 Conference.

1992

1991

    Discover Award for Computer Software Finalist

  • John Rosenberg, University of Pittsburgh, was a finalist in the Discover Award for Computer Software for his work to simulate the complicated interaction between DNA and a enzyme protein.

    • See the Projects in Scientific Computing article, "Kinky DNA"

    • Forefronts of Large-Scale Computing Award

  • The team of John Rosenberg, University of Pittsburgh, Peter Kollman, University of California, San Francisco, Robert Swendsen, Carnegie Mellon University, and Shankar Kumar, University of Pittsburgh, won the Forefronts of Large-Scale Computing Award for their work in applying molecular dynamics to DNA research.

    • See the Projects in Scientific Computing article, "Kinky DNA"

1989

    Forefronts of Large Scale Computing Award

  • Gregory McRae, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won the first Forefronts of Large Scale Computation Award for his work in computational modeling of large atmospheric systems.