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| News |
| Conference |
| National Labs Contribute Expertise and Accomplishments to SC08 |
| By most accounts—Technical Paper submissions, total attendance or number of exhibitors—the SC08 conference held November 15-21 in Austin, Texas, was a smashing success. And from providing planning leadership to bringing home some of the top awards, people from DOE labs and research programs contributed heavily to the success of the conference. |
| "From its founding by George Michael and others in 1988, the SC conference series has always benefited from the HPC contributions and staff leadership from the DOE national laboratories, and this year was no exception," said SC08 General Chair Prof. Patricia Teller of the University of Texas–El Paso. "Not only did researchers at the DOE national labs make significant contributions to the Technical Program, but they also played key roles in planning and carrying out SC08—an endeavor requiring up to three years of commitment. The result of these efforts was what I consider to be the strongest conference ever." |
| Under the leadership of Adolfy Hoisie from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Technical Program Committee received a record 277 Technical Paper submissions, of which 59 were selected. Of the 59 accepted Technical Papers presented at SC08, 22 of them featured co-authors supported by DOE. |
| The SC08 Exhibits Committee, led by Becky Verastegui of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Dave Cooper, retired Associate Director of Computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), filled the Austin Convention Center exhibit halls with 337 booths—a new record for the conference. |
| The conference Communications Committee, chaired by Jon Bashor of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), carried out a year-long program to raise awareness of SC08, helping to raise total registration to more than 11,000—another all-time record. |
| Other DOE-supported researchers with significant roles were SC08 Executive Director Barry Hess, Sandia National Laboratories; Vice Chair James McGraw, LLNL; Broader Engagement Chair Tony Baylis, LLNL; and Energy Technology Thrust Co-chairs Steve Hammond, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Horst Simon, LBNL. |
| The IEEE Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award was presented to Prof. William Gropp for his major role in creating the MPI, the standard interprocessor communication interface for large-scale parallel computers during his tenure at Argonne National Laboratory. Gropp is now a professor at the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign. |
The ACM Gordon Bell Prize, established in 1987 to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing, was given to two projects led by DOE staff this year:
- The prize for peak performance went to: Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Gonzalo Alvarez, Michael S. Summers, Don E. Maxwell, Markus Eisenbach, Jeremy S. Meredith, Thomas A. Maier, Paul R. Kent, Eduardo D'Azevedo, Thomas C. Schulthess; and Cray Inc.'s Jeffrey M. Larkin and John M. Levesque for their entry, "New Algorithm to Enable 400+ TFlop/s Sustained Performance in Simulations of Disorder Effects in High-Tc."
- The ACM Gordon Bell Prize in a special recognition for algorithmic innovation was presented to Lin-Wang Wang, Byounghak Lee, Hongzhang Shan, Zhengji Zhao, Juan Meza, Erich Strohmaier, and David Bailey of LBNL for their work in "Linear Scaling Divide-and-Conquer Electronic Structure Calculations for Thousand Atom Nanostructures."
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| Each year at the SC conference, the editors of the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers release the latest edition of the list. The 32nd edition, presented at SC08, was capped by a duel for the top slot between the 1.105 petaflop IBM supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and the Cray XT5 supercomputer "Jaguar" at ORNL. The enhanced LANL system, known as Roadrunner, narrowly beat Jaguar's best performance of 1.059 petaflops in running the Linpack benchmark application. In the latest listing, seven of the top 10 systems are located at DOE facilities, while nine of the top 10 supercomputers are located in the United States. |
The SC conference series also hosts a variety of challenges in which teams take part in friendly yet spirited competitions with other participants. In the Analytics Challenge, which requires teams to complete solutions that embody all facets of high-performance computing, such as comprehensive computational approaches, processing of large datasets, and high-end visualization technology to display results, the winning team consisted of Christopher S. Oehmen, Lee Ann McCue, Bobbie-Jo Webb-Robertson, Scott Dowson, Justin Almquist, and Jason McDermott, all of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, for their entry, "Interactive HPC-Driven Visual Analysis for Multiple Genome Datasets."
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