PSC Receives Best-Ever Six 2018 HPCwire Awards

Awards Recognize Leaders in the Global high performance Computing (HPC) Community

Nov. 13, 2018

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has topped its best-ever performance of last year by receiving six 2018 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards. HPCwire presented the awards at the 2018 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC18), in Dallas, Texas. HPCwire revealed the list of winners at their booth at the event and on the HPCwire website, located at www.HPCwire.com.

 PSC was recognized for:

  • Readers’ Choice Awards
    • Best Use of AI (Machine Learning/Deep Learning) – with Tuomas Sandholm of CMU, for his Libratus, an AI algorithm that ran on PSC’s Bridges system and beat four of the world’s best human specialists at Heads-Up, Texas Hold’em poker
    • Best Use of HPC Application in Life Sciences – for the Brain Image Library, a national public resource and collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the University of Pittsburgh, enabling researchers to deposit, analyze, mine, share and interact with large brain-image datasets
    • Best Use of HPC in Physical Sciences – with Chris Wolverton of Northwestern University, who used data-driven machine learning on Bridges to study the “high-pressure materials genome,” discovering new superconducting CuBi compounds, the first iron-bismuth compound and new TiO2 structures with potential for photocatalytic water splitting
    • Best Use of high performance Data Analytics – with Chris Mason of Weill Cornell Medicine, for his use of Bridges to carry out genomic and transcriptomic analyses in support of the NASA Twins Study
    • Best HPC Collaboration (Academia/Government/Industry) – with Juan Perilla of the University of Delaware, who used the Anton 2 system hosted at PSC thanks to D.E. Shaw Research and operational funding by the National Institutes of Health for long time-scale simulations of HIV viral maturation
  • Editors’ Choice Award
    • Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement – with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, XSEDE, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the Open Science Grid (OSG), for simulations performed on PSC’s Bridges, SDSC’s Comet and the OSG that helped the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and its collaborating institutions pinpoint the origin of cosmic neutrinos; the multi-messenger astronomy discovery resulted in two high-profile articles in Science in July 2018

The coveted annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards are determined through a nomination and voting process with the global HPCwire community, as well as selections from the HPCwire editors. The awards are an annual feature of the publication and constitute prestigious recognition from the HPC community. These awards are revealed each year to kick off the annual supercomputing conference, which showcases high performance computing, networking, storage, and data analysis.

“This year marks the 15th anniversary of The HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards. These awards serve as a pillar in our community, acknowledging major achievements, outstanding leadership and innovative breakthroughs,” said Tom Tabor CEO of Tabor Communications, publisher of HPCwire. “Receiving an HPCwire award signifies an undeniable community support and recognition. We are proud to acknowledge our winners this year and as always to allow our readers voices to be heard. I would like to personally congratulate each and everyone of our winners, as their awards come well deserved.”

More information on these awards can be found at the HPCwire website (http://www.HPCwire.com) or on Twitter through the following hashtag: #HPCwireAwards.

About HPCwire: HPCwire is the #1 news and information resource covering the fastest computers in the world and the people who run them. With a legacy dating back to 1986, HPCwire has enjoyed a legacy of world-class editorial and journalism, making it the news source of choice selected by science, technology and business professionals interested in high performance and data-intensive computing. Visit HPCwire at www.hpcwire.com.