Dec. 14 — 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.

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.

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

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.

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:

• 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:

• 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

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 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 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

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.”

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.

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Source: SC15