SALT LAKE CITY, Utah., Aug. 23 — Six outstanding research efforts in high performance technical computing have been selected as finalists in supercomputing’s most prestigious competition, the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in High Performance Computing. The $10,000 prize will be presented to a single winner in November during SC16 in Salt Lake City, UT (USA).

The Gordon Bell Prize recognizes the extraordinary progress made each year in the innovative application of parallel computing to challenges in science, engineering and large-scale data analytics. Prizes may be awarded for peak performance or special achievements in scalability and time-to-solution on important science and engineering problems.

Financial support of the $10,000 prize is made possible by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing and past winner of the IEEE Seymour Cray Award for his exceptional contributions in the design of several computer systems that changed the world of high performance computing.

Gordon Bell prize finalists are selected by a committee comprising past Gordon Bell winners, as well as leaders in the field of high performance computing. Solving an important scientific or engineering problem in HPC is important, but scientific outcomes alone are not sufficient for this prize—finalists are selected from submissions that describe the innovations of the project, detail the performance levels achieved on one or more real-world applications, and outline what the implications of the approach are for the broader HPC community.

“High performance computing continues to underwrite the progress of research using computational methods for the analysis and modeling of complex phenomena,” said Vint Cerf and John White, ACM Award Committee co-chairs, in a statement. “This year’s finalists illustrate the key role that high performance computing plays in 21st Century research. The Gordon Bell Award committee has worked diligently to select from many choices, those most deserving of recognition for this year. Like everyone else, we will be eager to learn which of the nominees takes the top prize for 2016.”

This year’s finalists represent the broad impact that the field of high performance computing has across the many disciplines of science and engineering:

• “A Highly Effective Global Surface Wave Numerical Simulation with Ultra-High Resolution,” by a research team from the First Institute of Oceanography (China), National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (China) and Tsinghua University (China) (abstract)
• “Towards Green Aviation with Python at Petascale,” by a research team from Imperial College London (England) (abstract)
• “Modeling Dilute Solutions Using First-Principles Molecular Dynamics: Computing More than a Million Atoms with Over a Million Cores,” by a research team from Lawrence-Livermore National Laboratory (Calif.) (abstract)
• “Extreme-Scale Phase Field Simulations of Coarsening Dynamics on the Sunway Taihulight Supercomputer,” by a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of South Carolina, Columbia University (New York), the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (China) and the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi (China) (abstract)
• “Simulations of Below-Ground Dynamics of Fungi: 1.184 Pflops Attained by Automated Generation and Autotuning of Temporal Blocking Codes,” by a research team from RIKEN (Japan), Chiba University (Japan), Kobe University (Japan) and Fujitsu Ltd. (Japan) (abstract)
• “10M-Core Scalable Fully-Implicit Solver for Nonhydrostatic Atmospheric Dynamics,” by a research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University (China), the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (China) and Beijing Normal University (China) (abstract)

One of these submissions will be announced as the winner of the 2016 Gordon Bell Prize during SC16 on Thursday, Nov. 17.

The 2015 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for best performance of a high performance application went to a 10-member team led by Johann Rudi of the University of Texas at Austin for a study titled “An Extreme-Scale Implicit Solver for Complex PDEs: Highly Heterogeneous Flow in Earth’s Mantle.” The award was announced during SC15 in Austin, Texas, and the paper is available from the ACM Digital Library.

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Source: SC16