Awards Received by PSC Users and Staff

PSC is very proud of the wide recognition its users and its staff have received as a result of their research here.

2009

HPCwire, a leading electronic news outlet for high-performance computing and communication, awarded its 2009 Readers' Choice Award for "Top Supercomputing Achievement" to PSC for its research in H1N1 modeling. The award recognized PSC's work as part of the National Institutes of Health's Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS) project, which supports research to simulate disease spread and evaluate intervention strategies. In this work, PSC scientist Shawn Brown collaborates with the Pittsburgh MIDAS Center of Excellence, led by Donald Burke, M.D., of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.
- See the news release.

PSC senior network engineering specialist Matt Mathis was awarded the Test of Time Award from the the Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), for a 1997 paper, “The macroscopic behavior of the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm”. The paper, co-authored with former PSC staff members Jamshid Mahdavi and Jeff Semke and with Teunis Ott (then at Bellcore), was published in the ACM journal Computer Communication Review.
- See the news release.

A PSC team of two scientists and a University of Pittsburgh student won the award for “Best Demonstration” at TG08 during the annual conference of the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation's program of cyberinfrastructure for U.S. science and education. “WiiMD”, an innovative project that merges the video-game technology of the Nintendo Wii with interactive supercomputing, was developed by PSC staff Shawn Brown and Phil Blood and student intern Jordan Soyke.
- See the news release.

Three PSC-mentored high school students took first, second, and third prizes in the Science Competition at TG08, the annual conference of the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation's program of cyberinfrastructure for U.S. science and education. Matthew Stoffregen won first prize; Shivam Verma placed second and Srihari Seshadri, also a PSC student employee, placed third.
- See the news release.

In the TeraGrid Student Research competition at TG08, Maxwell Hutchinson, a Carnegie Mellon University student and PSC student programmer, came in second in undergraduate research.
- See the news release.

HPCwire, a leading electronic news outlet for high-performance computing and communication, awarded two of its 2007 Reader's Choice Awards for innovation to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center:
The National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing (NRBSC), PSC's biomedical research program, won for "Most Innovative Use of HPC in the Life Sciences".

ZEST, a PSC-developed file system that facilitates scientific computing on very large-scale (petascale) systems, won for "Most Innovative HPC Storage Technology or Product."
- See the news release.

A team of scientists and engineers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Texas, the University of California, Davis, and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center won the Analytics Challenge Award at SC06 for their work using PSC's Cray XT3 to realistically simulate earthquake ground motion and thereby better assess the seismic hazard to populated earthquake basins. SC06 is the 2006 international conference of high-performance computing, networking, data storage and analysis.
The award-winning project was officially titled “Remote Runtime Steering of Integrated Terascale Simulation and Visualization.” The full team comprised Hongfeng Yu, University of California, Davis (technical lead); Tiankai Tu, Carnegie Mellon (team lead); Jacobo Bielak, Carnegie Mellon; Omar Ghattas, University of Texas at Austin; Julio C. Lopez, Carnegie Mellon; Kwan-Liu Ma, University of California, Davis; David O'Hallaron, Carnegie Mellon; Leonardo Ramirez-Guzman, Carnegie Mellon; Nathan Stone, PSC; Ricardo Taborda-Rios, Carnegie Mellon; and John Urbanic, PSC.
- See the news release.

Jeff Gardner,PSC; Vladimir Litvin, California Institute of Technology; and Evan Turner, Texas Advanced Computing Center, won the best paper award at the 2006 CLADE (Challenges of Large Applications in Distributed Environments) workshop in Paris, France.
The paper, "Creating Personal Adaptive Clusters for Managing Scientific Jobs in a Distributed Computing Environment," described a system for aggregating processors on demand from across the distributed resources of the National Science Foundation TeraGrid.

The virtual environment described in the paper was built on top o f an existing middleware tool called GridShell. The combination, including the pre-existing middleware, was renamed MyCluster. In production use on the TeraGrid, as of May 2006 it had already handled about 100,000 jobs and 900 teraflops of scientific computation.
- See the news release.