HPCwire: 2009 Annual HPCwire Readers' Choice Awards

HPCwire >> Special Features >> SC09 >> SC09 Readers' Choice Awards

September 02, 2010

2009 Annual HPCwire Readers' Choice Awards

Every year at the Supercomputing Conference, HPCwire announces their Annual Readers and Editors Choice Awards. This year was no exception as two new categories were introduced - HPC in the Cloud, and Green Computing. Awards were also given for HPC applications in life sciences, manufacturing and financial services, as well as for HPC storage, visualization, interconnects and more. Here's the final list of the 2009 award recipients.

Best application of "green computing" in HPC

Readers' Choice: Blue Gene/P at Argonne National Laboratory. Argonne's 557 teraflops Blue Gene/P consumes just over a megawatt of power - about half as much as a conventional cluster supercomputer of comparable performance.

Dave Martin, Manager, User Services and Outreach, Ray Blair, Tom Tabor and Peter Beckman, Ph.D., Director, Argonne National Laboratory.
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Editor's Choice: IBM QS22 BladeCenter at Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics. Germany's IBM QS22 supercomputer cluster is one of the world's most energy-efficient clusters, consuming about 2 Watts per gigaflop.

Tom Tabor and Tom Arthur, Deep Computing, Herb Schultz, Director, Business Systems, and Dave Turek, Vice President, Deep Computing, IBM.
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Dr. Franz-Josef Pfreundt, Division Director, Fraunhofer Institute, and Tom Tabor.
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Best HPC server product or technology

Readers' Choice: SGI Altix ICE. SGI's workhorse server line for HPC, offering one of the best integrated, cool-running blade solutions.

George Skaff, Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Tom Tabor, and Mark Barrenechea, President & CEO, SGI.
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Editor's Choice: Bull "bullx". Purpose built for HPC, the bullx server pushes the envelope in performance and engineering.

Tom Tabor and Fabio Gallo, Vice-President and Director of HPC Solutions, Bull.
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Best HPC storage product or technology

Readers' Choice: BlueArc Titan Architecture. BlueArc's Titan 3000 storage architecture scales up to 4 petabyte (PB) of data in a single namespace.

Bridget Warwick, Vice-President of Marketing, BlueArc, and Tom Tabor.
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Editor's Choice: DataDirect Networks SFA 10000. With DataDirect's first generation Storage Fusion Architecture, the company has incorporated superior IOPS performance into its traditional high throughput design.

Tom Tabor and Paul Bloch, President and Co-Founder, DataDirect.
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Best HPC software product or technology

Readers' Choice: PGI Accelerator Compilers. With its focus on application performance, PGI offers some of the most advance compiler technology to the HPC developer.

Tom Tabor, Michael Markowitz, Director of Technical Media Relations, and Doug Miles, Director, PGI.
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Editor's Choice: NVIDIA CUDA. NVIDIA's wildly popular compiler, libraries, and drivers are at the heart of the GPU computing revolution that is transforming HPC.

Andrew Walsh, Director of Marketing, Sheryl Huynh, Director of Event Marketing, NVIDIA, and Tom Tabor.
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Best HPC interconnect product or technology

Readers' Choice: Arista Networks 7100 Switches. Arista's high-density, low latency 10GbE switches are setting the performance bar for all Ethernet switch vendors.

Mark Foss, Andy Bechtolsheim, David Twinam, Mansour Karam, Anshul Sadana, Arista, and Tom Tabor and Jeff Hyman.
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Editor's Choice: Mellanox ConnectX Technology. Mellanox's fourth generation I/O adapter technology offers the best of both worlds by supporting both QDR InfiniBand and 10GbE in a single controller.

Brian Sparks, Director, Marketing Communications, Mellanox, and Tom Tabor.
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Best HPC cluster solution or technology

Readers' Choice: HP Cluster Platform 3000. One of the most popular HPC cluster solutions, the HP Cluster Platform 3000, the modular framework supports can scale from 5 to 1024 nodes, or even higher.

Tom Tabor and Ed Turkel, Manager, Business Development, HP.
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Editor's Choice: Cray CX1. Cray's first deskside HPC cluster brings entry-level supercomputing into the office.

Peter Ungaro, CEO, Tom Tabor and Ian Miller, Sr. VP.
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Top supercomputing achievement

Readers' Choice: Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center - Pandemic Modeling for H1N1 Influenza for NIH MIDAS Project. As part of the National Institutes of Health's Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS) project, PSC researchers uses the centers supercomputing resources to model of the spread of the H1N1 virus in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.

David Moses, Executive Director, Ralph Roskies, Scientific Director, PSC, and Tom Tabor.
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Editor's Choice: Jaguar, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. ORNL's Jaguar petascale supercomputer has enjoyed an exceptional long life at the US Department of Energy lab, having been continuously upgraded since its initial deployment in 2005.

Tom Tabor and Jeff Nichols, Ph.D., Associate Laboratory Director, ORNL.
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Best HPC collaboration between government and industry

Readers' Choice: U.S. Department of Energy INCITE Program 2009. Popular U.S government program that shares CPU hours on DOE's elite supercomputers with universities, research institutions and industry.

Editor's Choice: "Hyperion" Project: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with Dell, Intel, Supermicro, QLogic, Cisco, Mellanox, DataDirect Networks, Sun Microsystem, LSI and RedHat. The NNSA's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory teamed with 10 vendors to build and support a large-scale Linux cluster test bed to explore high performance computing technologies.

Mark Seager, Assistant DH for Advanced Technology, LLNL, Tom Tabor and Matt Leininger, HPC Architectures & Platforms, LLNL.
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Marc Stearman, LLNL, Lustre/Hyperion Technical Lead, Steve Hochberg, LSI, Sr. Director, Tom Tabor, Matt Leininger, LLNL, HPC Architectures & Platforms, Steven Carter, Cisco, Systems Engineer, Mark Seager, Assistant DH for Advanced Technology, Bruce Jastremski, LSI, HPC Business Development Executive.
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Tom Tabor, John Garrett, Federal Sales, John Mullen, Vice President & GM, Education, State & Local Government, Frank Muehleman, Vice President & GM Public Business Group, Dell.
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John Hengeveld, Director, Technical Computing & HPC Marketing, Intel, and Tom Tabor.
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Dr. Tau Leng, General Manager, Supermicro, and Tom Tabor.
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Tom Tabor, Steve Zivanic, Sr. Director Corporate Communications, and Pohan Chiang, Vice President, OEM Sales, QLogic.
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Imran Mazhar, Cisco, Systems Engineering Manager, Tom Tabor, Shannon Vanlandingham, Cisco, Regional Manager for Civilian Scientific, Matt Leininger, LLNL, HPC Architectures & Platforms.
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Tom Tabor and Brian Sparks, Director, Marketing Communications, Mellanox.
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Tom Tabor and Paul Bloch, President and Co-Founder, DataDirect Networks.
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Marc Hamilton, Vice President, HPC Sales, Sun, and Tom Tabor.
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Top 5 new products or technologies to watch

Readers' Choice:

Chelsio Unified Wire 10GbE. Will Chelsio's head start in converged Ethernet adapters pay off?

Intel "Larrabee". Will Intel be able to go up against AMD and NVIDIA with its new "un-GPU?"

John Hengeveld, Director, Technical Computing & HPC Marketing, Intel, and Tom Tabor.
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Bull "bullx" supercomputer. Will Bull be able to capture the European HPC market with its new home-grown supercomputing offering?

Tom Tabor and Fabio Gallo, Vice-President and Director of HPC Solutions, Bull.
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NVIDIA "Fermi" GPU. Will Fermi make the GPU a mainstay in HPC?

Andrew Walsh, Director of Marketing, Sheryl Huynh, Director of Event Marketing, NVIDIA, and Tom Tabor.
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AMD "Istanbul". Will AMD's latest chip be able to hold its own against the Intel juggernaut?

Margaret Lewis, Dir. Commercial ISV Marketing, AMD, and Tom Tabor.
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Editor's Choice:

ScaleMP vSMP. Will vSMP make real SMP systems obsolete?

Tom Tabor and Shai Fultheim, Founder and President, ScaleMP.
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HPC cloud technologies. Is the cloud ready for high performance computing?

NVIDIA "Fermi" GPU. Is Fermi the technology that unleashes GPU supercomputing?

Andrew Walsh, Director of Marketing, Sheryl Huynh, Director of Event Marketing, NVIDIA, and Tom Tabor.
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Flash memory storage. Will 2010 be the year of flash technology adoption in HPC?

OpenCL (The Khronos Group). Will OpenCL level the playing field for GPU computing?

Top 5 vendors to watch

Readers' Choice:

SGI. Everyone is watching to see if Rackable can help SGI regain its former glory.

George Skaff, Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Tom Tabor, and Mark Barrenechea, President & CEO, SGI.
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Cray Inc. The supercomputer icon is looking healthy, thanks to an influx of government spending and Pete Ungaro's steady leadership.

Peter Ungaro, CEO, Tom Tabor and Ian Miller, Sr. VP.
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IBM. The IT giant and TOP500 leader has been busy revamping its HPC portfolio.

Tom Tabor and Tom Arthur, Deep Computing, Herb Schultz, Director, Business Systems, and Dave Turek, Vice President, Deep Computing, IBM.
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Sun Microsystems. With the acquisition still in limbo, Sun's HPC business is a big question mark.

Marc Hamilton, Vice President, HPC Sales, Sun, and Tom Tabor.
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Dell. The number three HPC server maker could make a move in 2010.

Tom Tabor, John Mullen, Vice President & GM, Education, State & Local Government, and Frank Muehleman, Vice President & GM Public Business Group, Dell.
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Editor's Choice:

Microsoft Corp. The software giant has been steadily acquiring world-class HPC talent, but is just beginning to make its presence felt.

Tom Tabor and Kyril Faenov, GM.
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SGI Everyone is watching to see if Rackable can help SGI regain its former glory.

George Skaff, Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Tom Tabor, and Mark Barrenechea, President & CEO, SGI.
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NVIDIA Corp. The GPU maker's Fermi architecture may change the game for supercomputing.

Andrew Walsh, Director of Marketing, Sheryl Huynh, Director of Event Marketing, NVIDIA, and Tom Tabor.
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Convey Computer Corporation The startup server maker is positioned to lead FPGAs out of the HPC wilderness.

Bruce Toal, President and CEO, Convey, Tom Tabor and Steve Wallach, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer, Convey.
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Sun Microsystems With the acquisition still in limbo, Sun's HPC business is a big question mark.

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