Conference sets tech program attendee record

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 24 -- SC10, the international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, concluded Friday, Nov. 19, following the recognition of achievements by members of the supercomputing community.

Among the honors presented during the conference were the IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Award, the IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award, the ACM/IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award, ACM Gordon Bell Prizes, ACM/IEEE Computer Society George Michael Memorial HPC Ph.D. Fellowship Award, several competitive challenges, best paper and best poster awards.

Held at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, this year's conference set an all-time record for participation in the technical program with 4,390 attendees. Overall attendance broke the 10,000 mark. In addition, 338 exhibitors leveraged the conference's 386,000 square feet of exhibit hall space in the convention center. The successful event marked the 23rd anniversary of the SC conference series.

"At a time of momentous change in supercomputing, the conference was once again the focal point of the global high performance computing community," said Barry Hess, SC10 general chair and deputy CIO for Sandia National Laboratories. "The volunteers who make SC possible put together a conference, from the record-setting technical program and special sessions to the floor exhibits, that was second to none in HPC. My special thanks to all those who contributed to SC10 and my congratulations to those honored for their outstanding achievements and contributions to the community."

The following individuals and organizations were recognized with awards:

James W. Demmel, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, received the 2010 IEEE Computer Society's Sidney Fernbach Award for computational science leadership in creating adaptive, innovative, high-performance linear algebra software." Read more at http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news093010b.html.

Alan Gara, chief system architect for the three generations of Blue Gene supercomputers, was awarded the IEEE Computer Society's 2010 Seymour Cray Award for his "innovations in low power, densely packaged supercomputing systems." Read more at http://www.computer.org/portal/web/pressroom/20101004cray.

David Kuck, an Intel Fellow, received the second annual ACM-IEEE Computer Society's Ken Kennedy Award for advances to compiler technology and parallel computing that have improved the cost-effectiveness of multiprocessor computing. The Kennedy Award also cited him for the widespread inspiration of his teaching and mentoring. Read more at http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2010/kennedy-award-2010/view.

ACM/IEEE George Michael Memorial PhD Fellowship Award winners:

The ACM, IEEE Computer Society and SC Conference series established the George Michael HPC Ph.D. Fellowship Program to honor exceptional Ph.D. students throughout the world. Fellowship recipients are selected based on their overall potential for research excellence, the degree to which their technical interests align with those of the HPC community, their academic progress to date and demonstration of their anticipated use of HPC resources.

2010 winners:

• ACM/IEEE George Michael Memorial High Performance Computing Fellow for 2010 is Aparna Chandramowlishwaran of the Georgia Institute of Technology for her research entitled "Autotuning N-body computations using novel parallel programming models".
   
• ACM/IEEE George Michael Memorial High Performance Computing Fellow for 2010 is Amanda E Peters of Harvard University for her research entitled "Multiscale simulation of cardiovascular flows on the IBM Bluegene/P: full heart-circulation system at red-blood cell resolution".
   
• Honorable Mention ACM/IEEE George Michael Memorial High Performance Computing Fellow for 2010 for Sara Baghsorkhi of University of Illinois for her research entitled "A Performance Analyzing Tool for GPU Computing".
   
• Honorable Mention ACM/IEEE George Michael Memorial High Performance Computing Fellow for 2010 for Matthew R Norman of North Carolina State University for his research entitled "Harnessing Petascale Computing Resources for Atmospheric Climate Simulation: An Algorithmic Approach".

Gordon Bell Prize winners:

The Gordon Bell Prize is awarded each year to recognize outstanding achievement in HPC. Now administered by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), financial support of the $10,000 award is provided by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high performance and parallel computing. The purpose of the award is to track the progress over time of parallel computing, with particular emphasis on rewarding innovation in applying HPC to applications in science.

Best performance: "Petascale Direct Numerical Simulation of Blood Flow on 200K Cores and Heterogeneous Architectures," Abtin Rahimian, Ilya Lashuk, Shravan Veerapaneni, Aparna Chandramowlishwaran, Dhairya Malhotra, Logan Moon, Rahul Sampath, Aashay Shringarpure, Jeffrey Vetter, Richard Vuduc, Denis Zorin, George Biros.

Honorable mention performance: "Toward First Principles Electronic Structure Simulations of Excited States and Strong Correlations in Nano- and Materials Science," Anton Kozhevnikov, Adolfo G. Eguiluz, Thomas C. Schulthess. A second honorable mentionwent to "190 TFlops Astrophysical N-body Simulation on a Cluster of GPUs," Tsuyoshi Hamada, Keigo Nitadori.

Best Technical Paper:

• "Characterizing the Influence of System Noise on Large-Scale Applications by Simulation," Torsten Hoefler, Timo Schneider, and Andrew Lumsdaine.

Best Student Paper:

• "OpenMPC: Extended OpenMP Programming and Tuning for GPUs," by Seyong Lee and Rudolf Eigenmann.

 Best Research Poster:

• "Characterizing the Impact of Soft Errors on Sparse Linear Solvers," by Sowmyalatha Srinivasmurthy, Manu Shantharam, Padma Raghavan, Mahmut Kandemir.

 Best Student Posters:

Graduate Students:

First place: "Scale and Concurrency of GIGA+: File System Directories with Millions of Files" by Swapnil Patil, CMU.

Second place: "Optimizing End-to-End Performance of Scientific Workflows in Distributed Environments" by Yi Gu, University of Memphis.

Third place: "An Efficient Algorithm for Obtaining Low Memory Approximation Models of Large-Scale Networks" by Kanimathi Duraisamy, University of Nebraska – Omaha.

Undergraduate students:

First place: "Parallelized Hartree-Fock Code for Scalable Structural and Electronic Simulation of Large Nanoscale Molecules" by David C. Goode, Harvard University.

Second place: "An Integration of Dynamic MPI Formal Verification Within Eclipse PTP" by Alan P. Humphrey, University of Utah.

Third place: "Finding Tropical Cyclones on Clouds" by Daren J Hasenkamp, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

Storage Challenge

The Storage Challenge is a competition showcasing applications and environments that effectively use the storage subsystem in high performance computing, which is often a limiting system component. Judging is based on these measurements as well as innovation and effectiveness.

2010 Winner: "Scaling Highly-Parallel Data-Intensive Supercomputing Applications on a Parallel Clustered File system" Karan Gupta, Reshu Jain, Himabindu Pucha, Prasenjit Sarkar, Dinesh Subhraveti, IBM Almaden Research Center.

Student Cluster Competition (SCC)

The Student Cluster Competition (SCC) showcases next-generation high-performance computing talent harnessing the incredible power of current-generation cluster hardware. In this real-time challenge, teams of six undergraduate and/or high school students assemble a small cluster of their own design on the SC exhibit floor and race to correctly complete the greatest number of application runs during the competition period. The catch is the teams must run real HPC workloads on the same power needed to run only three coffee makers -- 26 Amps! During the competition, teams were judged on the speed of the HPCC benchmarks, the throughput and accuracy of applications runs, and ability to impress SC participants and judges during the conference.

Out of a field of eight teams from around the world, the Overall Winner of the 4th SCC is National Tsing Hua University from Taiwan, which partnered with ACER Incorporated, Tatung Company, and NCHC. NTHU won with the highest aggregate points in the HPCC benchmark, throughput and correctness of real-world applications, and interviews.

The winner of the SCC Highest LINPACK was the University of Texas at Austin partnered with Dell and the Texas Advanced Computer Center, exceeding 1 TeraFLOP for the first time ever in the Student Cluster Competition while staying below the 26 Amp constrained power budget.

About SC10

SC10, sponsored by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Scalable Computing and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Architecture, showcased how high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in research, education and commerce. This premiere international conference included technical and education programs, workshops, tutorials, an exhibit area, demonstrations and hands-on learning. For more information, visit http://sc10.supercomputing.org/.

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Source: SC10