November 18, 2013

The HPCwire awards were announced and presented during the 2013 Supercomputing Conference, held in Denver, Colorado. The annual awards are highly coveted as prestigious recognition of achievement by the HPC community. HPCwire extends its congratulations to this year’s winners.

Best use of HPC application in manufacturing

Readers’ Choice:
HLRS Stuttgart and DataDirect Networks ASCS for Large Scale Problem Resolution

Editor’s Choice:
GE Research using Oak Ridge National Laboratory Cray “Titan” for Industrial Cold Temperature Research Projects

Best use of HPC in life sciences

Readers’ Choice:
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and SGI “Blacklight” for Next Generation Sequencing Assembly

Editor’s Choice:
NCSA “Blue Waters” with Cray technologies and NVIDIA GPUs to achieve breakthroughs in HIV CAPSID Research

Best use of HPC in automotive

Readers’ Choice:
Infiniti Red Bull Racing using IBM Platform Computing GPFS Systems for Formula One Racing Design

Editor’s Choice:
Ford Motor Company and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility Cray “Jaguar” for automotive research to boost airflow and increase fuel efficiency

Best use of HPC in financial services

Readers’ Choice:
PayPal and SGI, Mellanox, and DataDirect Networks technologies for fraud detection and prevention during PayPal transactions

Editor’s Choice: (2 winners)
* XSEDE PSC SGI “Blacklight” and SDSC Cray “Gordon” Research enables faster market analysis and imposes stricter regulation of stock market trading
* Xcelerit SDK and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs power accelerated risk analysis for HSBC

Best use of HPC in the oil and gas industry

Readers’ Choice:
TOTAL using SGI “Pangea” for oil and gas exploration

Editor’s Choice:
British Petroleum’s CHPC Petascale system using HP, Intel, and DataDirect Networks technologies to solve the world’s biggest energy challenges

Best use of HPC in the entertainment industry

Readers’ Choice:
Pixar Animation Studio’s Lighting Tool with NVIDIA OptiX Ray Tracing Engine

Editor’s Choice:
Pixar Animation Studio’s Lighting Tool with NVIDIA OptiX Ray Tracing Engine

Best use of HPC “in edge” HPC application

Readers’ Choice:
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, University of Notre Dame, and VecNet CI for cutting edge, complex disease modeling

Editor’s Choice:
Dwave for Commercial Quantum Computing

Best use of HPC in the cloud

Readers’ Choice:
The UberCloud HPC Project and the Compendium of Case Studies

Editor’s Choice:
Cycle Computing “CycleCloud”, Amazon EC2 and Opscode Chef 11 Server for breakthroughs in cancer research

Best application of “green computing” in HPC

Readers’ Choice:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM “Sequoia” the world’s most energy efficient supercomputer

Editor’s Choice:
DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory Asetek RackCDU and Aspen Systems for retrofitting its Skynet HPC cluster

Best HPC server product or technology

Readers’ Choice:
Intel Xeon Processor

Editor’s Choice:
Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor

Best HPC storage product or technology

Readers’ Choice:
DataDirect Network SFA7700 Hybrid Flash Storage Appliance

Editor’s Choice:
SGI InfiniteStorage Gateway

Best HPC software product or technology

Readers’ Choice:
NVIDIA CUDA Parallel Computing Platform and Programming Model

Editor’s Choice:
OpenACC Specification 2.0

Best HPC visualization product or technology

Readers’ Choice:
Bull ExtremeFactory Remote Visualizer 3D Streaming Technology

Editor’s Choice:
Bull ExtremeFactory Remote Visualizer 3D Streaming Technology

Best application of Big Data in HPC

Readers’ Choice:
GENCI CURIE for DEUS
(Dark Energy Universe Simulation) project

Editor’s Choice:
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and Cray YarcData Urika “Sherlock” to unlock the secrets of Big Data

Best HPC interconnect product or technology

Readers’ Choice:
Mellanox InfiniScale IV is5030 36-Port QDR Infiniband Switch

Editor’s Choice:
Mellanox MetroX Technology

Best HPC cluster solution or technology

Readers’ Choice:
Cray CS300 Cluster Supercomputer

Editor’s Choice:
Cray CS300 Cluster Supercomputer

Best HPC collaboration between government and industry

Readers’ Choice:
Ford Motor Company and Oak Ridge National Laboratory Cray “Jaguar” with DataDirect Networks technology for CAE and CFD simulation

Editor’s Choice:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM “Vulcan” Deployment of HPC technologies to boost US economic competitiveness

Top supercomputing achievement

Readers’ Choice:
Total and SGI “Pangea” the World’s Largest Commercial HPC Deployment

Editor’s Choice:
NSF Texas Advanced Computing Center “Stampede” Comprehensive Petascale Science Environment with technology partners Dell, Intel, DataDirect Networks, Mellanox, and NVIDIA

Top 5 new products or technologies to watch (in order of ranking)

Readers’ Choice:
(1) Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors; (2) NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA; (3) OpenACC; (4) IBM FlashSystem; (5) Mellanox Connect-IB 56Gb/s FDR InfiniBand HC

Editor’s Choice:
(1) D-Wave Quantum Computing Technology; (2) NVIDIA and Mellanox for RDMA Developments; (3) OpenACC; (4) IBM NextScale; (5) Spectra Logic Black Pearl

Top 5 vendors to watch (in order of ranking)

Readers’ Choice:
(1) Intel; (2) NVIDIA; (3) Cray; (4) IBM; (5) Mellanox

Editor’s Choice:
(1) SGI; (2) Calxeda; (3) Univa; (4) Xyratex; (5) Cray