SC15 Awards Ceremony Recap: Part Two

This is the second installment of the SC15 Awards recap.  To read the first article, click here.

SC15 Posters Chair, Manish Parashar, addresses the SC15 attendees during the Best Poster and ACM Student Research Competition Awards presentation in Austin, Texas.

This article will recap the following from the SC15 Awards Ceremony:

• Best Posters
• The IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing for Early Career Researchers
• Scientific Visualization and Data Analytics Showcase
• George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship
• ACM Student Research Competition
• ACM Gordon Bell Prize

SC Posters encourage collaboration and conversations.

The first awards segment to highlight is the robust posters competition, which includes the ACM Student Research Competition.  Research posters showcase some of the most cutting-edge research in high performance computing (HPC), storage, networking and data analytics.

Posters are always a great area for positive discourse.

This year, SC received 254 detailed submissions that went through a rigorous review process. In the end, 114 posters were accepted and seven finalists were selected for the Best Poster Award.

As part of its research poster activities, SC15 also hosted the ACM Student Research Competition. It enables undergraduate and graduate students to experience the research world, share results and exchange ideas. They also have a chance to rub shoulders with academic and industry leaders and gain an understanding of the applications of their research.

The Student Research Competition encourages research excellence.

This year, SC received 64 submissions that went through a rigorous review process. In the end, 25 Student Research Competition posters were accepted. The Student Research Competition includes travel support for all SC15 participating students as well as cash awards to the finalists. This award is co-sponsored by Microsoft Research.

The first place winners will move on to the Student Research Competition grand finals next year. According to SC15 Posters Chair, Manish Parashar, "The poster session is a very important activity where the poster authors and audiences enjoy face-to-face discussion on their technologies for a broader audience and great exposure for their work."

Best SC15 Poster

SC's Manish Parashar congratulates Timothy I. Mattox who was part of the team that won for Best Poster.

Parashar then introduced the overall winner of the SC15 Best Poster Award as "Parallelization, Acceleration, and Advancement of Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD) Methods".

Authors are as follows:

• Timothy I. Mattox - Engility Corporation
• James P. Larentzos - Engility Corporation 
• Christopher P. Stone - Computational Science and Engineering, LLC.
• Sean Ziegeler - Engility Corporation; John K. Brennan - U.S. Army Research Laboratory
• Martin Lísal - Institute of Chemical Process Fundamentals of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and J. E. Purkyne University.

The other SC15 Poster finalists:

• Performance, Power, and Energy of In-Situ and Post-Processing Visualization: A Case Study in Climate Simulation - with Vignesh Adhinarayanan - Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University as lead author.
• Development of Explicit Moving Particle Simulation Framework and Zoom-Up Tsunami Analysis System - with Kohei Murotani - University of Tokyo as lead author.
• Efficient Large-Scale Sparse Eigenvalue Computations on Heterogeneous Hardware - with Moritz Kreutzer - Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg as lead author.
• Memory Hotplug for Energy Savings of HPC systems - with Shinobu Miwa - Hiroki Honda University of Electro-Communications as lead author.
• Benchmark Simulation and Experimental Testbed Studies of AWGR-Based, Multi-Layer Photonic Interconnects for Low- Latency, Energy-Efficient Computing Architectures - with Paolo Grani - University of California Davis as lead author.
• Large-Scale and Massively Parallel Phase-Field Simulations of Pattern Formation in Ternary Eutectic Alloys - with Johannes Hötzer - Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences as lead author.

SC15 Student Research Awards.

ACM Student Research Winners
ACM CEO, Bobby Schnabel and ACM President, Alex Wolf presented the winners of the ACM Student Research Competition and took part in also introducing both the 2015 Undergraduate and Graduate Student Research Award finalists:

The SC15 Undergraduate Student Research Award Finalists on stage with members of the Awards Committee.

• Third Place: ”Modeling the Impact of Thread Configuration on Power and Performance of GPUs” by Tiffany A. Connors from Texas State University.
• Second Place: ”Optimization Strategies for Materials Science Applications on Cori: An Intel Knights Landing, Many Integrated Core Architecture” by Luther D. Martin from National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
• First Place: ”Lessons from Post-Processing Climate Data on Modern Flash-Based HPC Systems” by Adnan Haider from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Then the 2015 Graduate Student Research Award finalists were presented:

The SC15 Graduate Student Research Award Finalists on stage with members of the Awards Committee .

• Third Place: “High Performance Model Based Image Reconstruction” by Xiao Wang from Purdue University.
• Second Place: “Efficient Multiscale Platelets Modeling Using Supercomputers” by Na Zhang from Stony Brook University.
• First Place: "AccFFT: A New Parallel FFT Library for CPU and GPU Architectures” by Amir Gholami from the University of Texas at Austin.

Scientific Visualization and Data Analytics Showcase
This is the second year of the new format for the Scientific Visualization and Data Analytics Showcase. Six finalists competed for the Award and presented their movie during a dedicated session.

Movies were judged based on the following:

• Quality
• Creativity
• Innovation
• How each enables scientific discovery 

Members of the winning team accept their award.

The Scientific Visualization and Data Analytics Award went to “Visualization of Ocean Currents and Eddies in a High-Resolution Ocean Model," authored by: Francesca Samsel, Mark Petersen, Terece Turton. Gregory Abram, James Ahrens, and David Rogers. 


The other finalists were as follows:

• "Gasoline Compression Ignition: Optimizing Start of Injection Time" with Joseph Insley as the lead author.
• "Visualization Of Airflow Through The Human Respiratory System: The Sniff" with Fernando Cucchietti as the lead author.
• "Visualization of a Tornado-Producing Thunderstorm: A Study of Visual Representation" with David Bock as the lead author.
• "Extreme Multi-Resolution Visualization: A Challenge On Many Levels" with Joanna Balme as the lead author.
• "Chemical Visualization of Human Pathogens: The Retroviral Capsids" with Juan Perilla as the lead author.

IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing for Early Career Researchers
The IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing for Early Career Researchers recognizes individuals who have made outstanding and potentially long-lasting contributions to the field within five years of receiving their PhD.

The winners of the IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing for Early Career Researchers with members of the SC Awards Committee.

The following were the winners as announced by Manish Parashar who is also the SC15 Chair of the Award selection committee:
•    Ilkay Altintas, San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego
•    Aydin Buluç, Computational Research Division, Berkeley Lab (LBNL)
•    Kurt B. Ferreira, Sandia National Laboratories       
       

ACM/IEEE George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship
The George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship honors exceptional PhD students in our field. These Fellowships are sponsored by ACM, the IEEE Computer Society, and the SC Conference, and include a $5,000 honorarium. The George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship Chair is Barbara Horner-Miller.

The 2015 George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship winners are:

Maciej Besta (on the left) and Dhairya Malhotra accept their certificates as winners of the 2015 George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship from Barbara Horner-Miller, the George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship Chair.

• Maciej Besta from ETH Zurich for his project "Accelerating Large-Scale Distributed Graph Computations."
• Dhairya Malhotra from the University of Texas at Austin, for his project "Scalable Algorithms for Evaluating Volume Potentials."

ACM Gordon Bell Prize

Gordon Bell

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize is awarded for outstanding team achievement in HPC. The purpose of the award is to track the progress of parallel computing. Particular emphasis is placed on rewarding innovation in HPC to advance science, engineering and large-scale data analytics.

According to Cherri Pancake, ACM Awards Chair, "Solving a scientific or engineering problem is important, but performance as well as scientific outcomes are needed to win this prize." She continued, "Finalists were chosen on the basis of performance measurements already achieved when the papers were submitted.  Teams present their work in two sessions during the conference.  The winning team receives a $10,000 stipend."

Members of the winning Gordon Bell prize team on stage with some of the SC Awards Committee.

The winning selection was “An Extreme-Scale Implicit Solver for Complex PDEs: Highly Heterogeneous Flow in Earth’s Mantle” in the category Scalabilty and was authored by:

• Johann Rudi - The University of Texas at Austin
• A. Cristiano I. Malossi - IBM Corporation
• Tobin Isaac - The University of Texas at Austin
• Georg Stadler - Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
• Michael Gurnis - California Institute of Technology
• Peter W. J. Staar - IBM Corporation
• Yves Ineichen - IBM Corporation
• Costas Bekas - IBM Corporation
• Alessandro Curioni - IBM Corporation
• Omar Ghattas - The University of Texas at Austin

Listed below are the other finalists who also deserve congratulations:

• “Massively Parallel Models of the Human Circulatory System” with research led by Amanda Randles - Duke University.
• “An Extreme-Scale Implicit Solver for Complex -PDEs: Highly Heterogeneous Flow in Earth’s Mantle” with research led by Johann Rudi - The University of Texas at Austin.
• “The In-Silico Lab-on-a-Chip: Petascale and High-Throughput Simulations of Microfluidics at Cell Resolution - with research led by Diego Rossinelli - ETH Zurich.
• “Pushing Back the Limit of Ab-initio Quantum Transport Simulations on Hybrid Supercomputers" - with research led by Mauro Calderara - ETH Zurich.
• “Implicit Nonlinear Wave Simulation with 1.08T DOF and 0.270T Unstructured Finite Elements to Enhance Comprehensive Earthquake Simulation” - with research led by Tsuyoshi Ichimura - University of Tokyo.

This completes the summary of the SC15 Awards Ceremony.  Congratulations to all finalists and winners. Check back here for more conference updates or click here to view the SC16 website.

Finalists Compete for Prestigious ACM Gordon Bell Prize in High Performance Computing

Winners to be announced at SC15 in Austin, TX (USA)

Austin, TX (USA) –  August 20, 2015 – Five outstanding research efforts in high performance technical computing have been selected as finalists in supercomputing’s most prestigious competition, the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in High Performance Computing. The $10,000 prize will be presented to a single winner during SC15 in Austin, TX (USA).

The Gordon Bell Prize recognizes the extraordinary progress made each year in the innovative application of parallel computing to challenges in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics. Prizes may be awarded for peak performance or special achievements in scalability and time-to-solution on important science and engineering problems. Financial support of the $10,000 prize is made possible by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing and past winner of the IEEE Seymour Cray Award for his exceptional contributions in the design of several computer systems that changed the world of high performance computing.

Gordon Bell prize finalists are selected by a committee comprising past Gordon Bell winners, as well as leaders in the field of high performance computing. Solving an important scientific or engineering problem in HPC is important, but scientific outcomes alone are not sufficient for this prize—finalists are selected from submissions that describe the innovations of the project, detail the performance levels achieved on one or more real-world applications, and outline what the implications of the approach are for the broader HPC community.

“The task of selecting this year’s finalists was difficult, but rewarding,” notes co-chair of ACM’s Award committee, Cherri M. Pancake of Oregon State University. “Each year the Bell submissions reflect the very best of what is happening in the high performance computing technical community and the progress that has been made in applying these remarkable computing resources to society’s most challenging problems.”

This year’s finalists represent the broad impact that the field of high performance computing has across the many disciplines of science and engineering:

• “Massively Parallel Models of the Human Circulatory System,” with research led by Amanda Randles of Duke University and a team of collaborators from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM (abstract)
• “The In-Silico Lab-On-A-Chip: Petascale And High-Throughput Simulations Of Microfluidics At Cell Resolution,” led by Diego Rossinelli of ETH Zurich and an international team of researchers from Brown University, the University of Italian Switzerland, the National Research Council of Italy, NVIDIA Corporation, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (abstract)
• “Pushing Back the Limit of Ab-initio Quantum Transport Simulations on Hybrid Supercomputers,” led by Mauro Calderara with a team from ETH Zurich (abstract)
• “Implicit Nonlinear Wave Simulation with 1.08T DOF and 0.270T Unstructured Finite Elements to Enhance Comprehensive Earthquake Simulation,” led by a team that includes the University of Tokyo, RIKEN, Niigata University, the University of Tsukuba, and the Research Organization for Information Science and Technology (abstract)
• “An Extreme-Scale Implicit Solver for Complex PDEs: Highly Heterogeneous Flow in Earth’s Mantle,” led by Johann Rudi from University of Texas at Austin and a team that includes IBM, the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, and the California Institute of Technology (abstract)

One of these submissions will be announced as the winner of the 2015 Gordon Bell Prize during SC15 on Thursday, 19 November.

The 2014 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for best performance of a high performance application went to “Anton 2: Raising the Bar for Performance and Programmability in a Special-Purpose Molecular Dynamics Supercomputer,” from author David E. Shaw and collaborators at D.E. Shaw Research, part of the proceedings of SC14 and available in the ACM Digital Library.

1988 Gordon Bell Prize Creates Foundation for Successful HPC Career

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Deputy Director Horst Simon still displays the 1988 Gordon Bell Prize he shared in. Behind him is the 2009 Gordon Bell Prize awarded to a team he was a part of. Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, LBNL.

In the foyer of the main building at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a panel displaying the 13 Nobel Prize-winning researchers and projects associated with the lab takes pride of place. Just down the hallway, Deputy Lab Director Horst Simon has two awards displayed prominently in his office, Gordon Bell Prize certificates from 1988 and 2009.

Though not as famous as the prizes created by Alfred Nobel, the prizes endowed by Gordon Bell, who rose to fame as a computer designer for Digital Equipment Corp., are highly valued by the scientists whose scientific applications push the sustained performance of leading edge supercomputers. The awarding of each year’s prizes are a highlight of the SC conference held every November.

An industry article from the time.

Simon, along with Phong Vu, Cleve Ashcraft, Roger Grimes, John Lewis and Barry Peyton, achieved the first 1 gigaflop/s performance of a science application, running a general sparse matrix vectorization on a Cray Y-MP computer. At the time, Simon, Grimes and Lewis worked for Boeing Computing Services, Simon was based at NASA Ames, Vu worked at Cray Research, Ashcraft was at Yale and Peyton was at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The 1988 prize was awarded at the IEEE CompCon meeting held in March 1989 in San Francisco.

While Lewis, Grimes and Ashcraft developed the code, Simon had been using the eight-processor

Y-MP with a peak performance of 1.6 gigaflop/s at NASA Ames and saw the potential. After doing a lot of fine tuning, the team was able to get the highest performance from what many considered a machine with the “old” vector processing technology.
“At the time, there was a lot of debate about how to go parallel,” Simon recalled. “One path was with the Cray that had a few very powerful processors, while others were looking to systems with hundreds of smaller processors.”

In fact, the other two Gordon Bell Prizes awarded in 1988, one for best price-performance and another for compiler parallelization, were for applications run on a 1,024-processor N-CUBE. But none of the highly parallel systems of that time could claim a theoretical peak in excess of 1 gigaflop/s.

Winners of the 1988 Gordon Bell Prize are presented with the award.

“I was absolutely elated to be a member of the winning team – I was early in my career and thought that an award for parallel performance was a great idea,” Simon said. “I was fortunate to be in a great group at Boeing and be part of a great team at NASA. The award came at a time when parallel computing was emerging as a hot topic and it was a great career boost – it established my credentials in HPC.”

He has continued to add to those credentials, including serving as one of four editors of the twice-yearly TOP500 list, which rates the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
Simon said that the original motivation for parallel computers was not how to solve problems that ran on one processor faster, but to solve problems that needed more processors. And the goal was to increase the overall speed as you scaled up to bigger and bigger machines.

The idea for the annual prize grew out of a SIAM meeting in 1985, when a group tossed around the idea of having a prize recognizing the speedup of real applications on real parallel machines. Alan Karp of IBM got things rolling by offering $100 out of his own pocket as a prize. Since 2011, the winners share $10,000.

The very first prize was given to Robert Benner, John Gustafson and Gary Montry, all of Sandia National Laboratories. Simon said their work was a conceptual breakthrough that helped define the future of parallel computing. In the late 1980s there was a lot of discussion of how much speed-up one could actually obtain on parallel computer for a fixed problem, later called strong scaling. The Sandia group defined what became to be known as weak scaling: the motivation for parallel computers was not how to solve problems that ran on one processor faster, but to solve problems that needed more processors. And the goal was to increase the overall speed as you scaled up to bigger and bigger machines.

For the first few years, the prize was awarded at CompCon, a general computing conference. But in the early 1990s, Simon worked with the SC conference committee to bring the Gordon Bell Prize into the supercomputing conference and the submissions deadline was changed to coincide with that of the conference. But unlike today where the prize entries are a formal part of the tech program, they were initially relegated to a Birds-of-a-Feather session.

At SC06 in Tampa Bay, the Gordon Bell Prize submissions were incorporated into a single track of the Technical Program. Also in 2006, the ACM assumed sponsorship and the name was officially changed to the ACM Gordon Bell Prize.

Fast forward to 2009 and Simon was a member of a team led by IBM’s Dharmendra Modha that created the largest brain simulation to date on a supercomputer, with the number of neurons and synapses in the simulation exceeding those in a cat’s brain. The team, which also included Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan and Steven K. Esser, won a Gordon Bell Prize in a special category for “The Cat is Out of the Bag: Cortical Simulations with 109 Neurons, 1013 Synapses.” For the project, the IBM team members came up with the idea and Simon provided the link to the supercomputing resources. Although the team did not claim to have actually simulated a cat brain, the award generated a flurry of controversy.

But the goal of simulating brain activity is nothing new. For years, Simon said, scientists have wondered if super computers could be used to create super intelligence, which although it has occurred in a number of films, cannot be done in silico.

“But it’s an interesting challenge and if we can understand how the brain computes, it could help us design more efficient computers,” Simon said. “After all, our brain only needs about 20 watts of power to easily outperform a supercomputer drawing 20 megawatts. If we could simulate a chip with brainlike characteristics, the results could help us build a better chip.”

The simulation of chips on HPC systems is interesting, but not mainstream, Simon said, which leads him to a parting anecdote.

“Steve Jobs wanted to design a one-piece plastic casing for the Apple 2 and used a Cray for the simulation of the injection mold flow process,” Simon said. “And when Seymour Cray was building the Cray 2, he used an Apple computer.”