SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, Nov. 14 — HPCwire, the leading publication for news and information for the high performance computing industry announced the winners of the 2016 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards at the Supercomputing Conference (SC16) taking place this week in Salt Lake City, UT. Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications Inc., unveiled the list of winners just before the opening gala reception.

“From thought leaders to end users, the HPCwire readership reaches and engages every corner of the high performance computing community,” said Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications, publisher of HPCwire. “Receiving their recognition signifies community support across the entire HPC space as well as the breadth of industries it serves. Each year we honored to engage with our readership through the Readers’ and Editors’ choice program, and to recognize these efforts and make the voices of our readers heard. Our thanks and highest congratulations go out to all the winners for their outstanding breakthroughs and achievements.”

HPCwire has designated two categories of Awards: (1) Readers’ Choice, where winners have been determined through election by HPCwire readers, and (2) Editors’ Choice, where winners have been selected by a panel of HPCwire editors and thought leaders in HPC. The process started with an open nomination process, with voting taking place throughout the month of September. These awards are widely recognized as being among the most prestigious recognition given by the HPC community to its own each year.

The 2016 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Award winners are:

Best Use of HPC Application in Life Sciences

Readers’ Choice: Seagate collaborates to provide Hudson Alpha with a high performance, high density storage solution to manage large amounts of data generated from Illumina next-gen sequencers.

Editors’ Choice: Earlham Institute (previously TGAC) uses SGI UV 300 for analysing highly-complex wheat genome – SGI’s largest instance for life sciences.

Best Use of HPC Application in Manufacturing

Readers’ Choice: MIT’s The Trout Group, a molecular engineering laboratory, works with Nor-Tech to develop new technologies to advance continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Editors’ Choice: Stanley Black & Decker has optimized CAE capabilities using Altair’s HyperWorks Unlimited private cloud, resulting in improved cycle times and accelerated decision-making.

Best Use of HPC Application in the Energy Industry

Readers’ Choice: GE and Oak Ridge National Laboratory achieve breakthrough combustion simulation for power generation to save more than $11 billion in fuel for US gas turbines over the next 20 years.

Editors’ Choice: Italian SME Zeco used 450k CPU hours on CINECA’s Galileo cluster through the Fortissimo HPC Cloud interface to develop a new type of Kaplan turbine.

Best Use of HPC in Automotive

Readers’ Choice: The NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 in-car artificial intelligence system delivers a 360 degree environment via sensing, localizing, reasoning and planning.

Editors’ Choice: Dana Holding Corp., supplier of automotive subsystems, upgrades five clusters to Cray technology and adopts Bright Cluster Manager to enhance and speed CAE.

Best Use of HPC in Financial Services

Readers’ Choice: Geico uses HPC to precalculate insurance quotes for every eligible U.S. household and individual.

Editors’ Choice: Quantopian collaborators create 400,000 trading algorithms on the company’s free web-based platform.

Best Use of HPC in Entertainment

Readers’ Choice: DreamWorks Animation utilizes HPE-enabled “scalable multi-core processing” for producing lifelike imagined environments that detail muscle, fur, feathers and cloth in animated films.

Editors’ Choice: With the adoption of DataDirect Networks’ MEDIAScaler, MLB Network has simplified the management of its live and archived video assets and sped up content access times.

Best Use of HPC in the Cloud

Readers’ Choice: Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides access to Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU servers with 10Gb connections and tools to help users create an HPC cluster on-demand.

Editors’ Choice (TIE): The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and Mellanox have collaborated to create a virtual off-loading computing processor used by SDSC Comet to optimize the processing of partner workloads and Nimbix pioneered the use of computational accelerators, including GPUs, FPGAs, DSPs and Intel Xeon Phis in cloud computing and has enabled the adoption of cloud for HPC workloads.

Best Use of High Performance Data Analytics

Readers’ Choice: Harvard, Allen Institute for Brain Science and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center identified brain cells that respond to visual elements through image alignment of large-scale EM datasets.

Editors’ Choice: UNC-Chapel Hill (IMS and CRC) work with the RENCI Hatteras Supercomputer from Dell EMC to predict dangerous coastal storm surges, including Hurricane Matthew.

Best Application of Energy-Efficient HPC

Readers’ Choice: German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) increased performance 20x and capacity 19x with Seagate ClusterStor 9000, while reducing energy consumption of I/O 2x over the previous system.

Editors’ Choice: The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) collaborated with Japanese government agency NEDO to explore improved energy efficiency using an HPE Apollo 8000 system (Hikari)

Best HPC Server Product or Technology

Readers’ Choice: NVIDIA DGX-1

Editors’ Choice: SGI UV 300

Best HPC Storage Product or Technology

Readers’ Choice: Seagate ClusterStor L300 with Intel Enterprise Edition Lustre

Editors’ Choice: DataDirect Networks SFA14K

Best HPC Software Product or Technology

Readers’ Choice: OpenHPC

Editors’ Choice: NVIDIA OpenACC Toolkit

Best HPC Visualization Product or Technology

Readers’ Choice: NVIDIA IndeX

Editors’ Choice: ParaView

Best HPC Interconnect Product or Technology

Readers’ Choice (TIE): Intel Omni-Path Architecture and Mellanox EDR InfiniBand

Editors’ Choice: Mellanox EDR InfiniBand

Best HPC Cluster Solution or Technology

Readers’ Choice: Intel Parallel Studio XE Cluster Edition

Editors’ Choice: Bright Cluster Manager for HPC from Bright Computing

Best Data-Intensive System (End-User focused)

Readers’ Choice: NASA Center for Climate Simulation – ADAPT (Advanced Data Analytics Platform)

Editors’ Choice: Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Bridges, architected by HPE

Best HPC Collaboration Between Government & Industry

Readers’ Choice: LANL and Seagate’s Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) develops power-managed disk and software solutions for deep data archiving and other next gen technologies.

Editors’ Choice: PNNL’s Center for Advanced Technology Evaluation (CENATE), a program for early evaluation of technologies, is currently assessing products from Micron Technology, Penguin Computing, NVIDIA, IBM, Data Vortex and Mellanox.

Best HPC Collaboration Between Academia & Industry

Readers’ Choice (TIE): OpenPOWER Academic Discussion Group is a community within the OpenPOWER Foundation focused on collaboration between industry and academia to develop a broad ecosystem for the POWER architecture and The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Lonestar 5 supercomputer, now in full production and built off technologies from Cray, Intel & DataDirect Networks, anchors TACC’s collaboration with industry program.

Editors’ Choice: The Centre for High Performance Computing, part of South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, supports cutting-edge research with high impact on the South African economy.

Top Supercomputing Achievement

Readers’ Choice: SDSC, TACC, Open Science Grid, XSEDE & UNL’s Holland Computing Center collaborate to verify the groundbreaking LIGO gravitational wave discovery.

Editors’ Choice (TIE): SDSC, TACC, Open Science Grid, XSEDE & UNL’s Holland Computing Center collaborate to verify the groundbreaking LIGO gravitational wave discovery and Sunway TaihuLight at the National Supercomputer Center in Wuxi, China, for building a 93-petaflops (LINPACK) supercomputer

Top 5 New Products or Technologies to Watch

Readers’ Choice: DataDirect Networks SFA14K, Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), Mellanox ConnectX-5, NVIDIA DGX-1, Seagate ClusterStor L300

Editors’ Choice: Cray Urika-GX, Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), NVIDIA DGX-1, SGI UV 300H, LBNL Singularity

Top 5 Vendors to Watch

Readers’ Choice: Cray, IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, Seagate

Editors’ Choice: Dell EMC, Fujitsu, HPE, IBM, NVIDIA

Workforce Diversity Leadership Award

Readers’ Choice: WiHPC – Women in HPC

Editors’ Choice (TIE): Women in HPC (WiHPC) and STEM-Trek

Outstanding Leadership in HPC

Readers’ Choice (TIE): Toni Collis, Director & Founder, Women in HPC and Dan Stanzione, Executive Director, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)

Editors’ Choice (TIE): Gilad Shainer, VP Marketing, Mellanox Technologies & Chair, HPC Advisory Council and Thomas Sterling, Professor of Informatics & Computing, Indiana University

More information on these awards can be found at the HPCwire website at https://www.hpcwire.com/2016-hpcwire-awards-readers-editors-choice/, or on Twitter through the following hashtag: #HPCwireAwards.

About HPCwire

HPCwire is the #1 news and information resource covering the fastest computers in the world and the people who run them. With a legacy dating back to 1986, HPCwire has enjoyed a history of world-class editorial and journalism, making it the news source of choice selected by science, technology and business professionals interested in high performance and data-intensive computing. Visit HPCwire at www.hpcwire.com

About Tabor Communications Inc.

Tabor Communications Inc. (TCI) is a media and services company dedicated to high-end, performance computing. As publisher of a complete advanced scale computing portfolio that includes HPCwire, Datanami, Enterprise Tech, and HPCwire Japan, TCI is the market-leader in online journalism covering emerging technologies within the high-tech industry, and a services company providing events, audience insights, and other services for companies engaged in performance computing in enterprise, government, and research. More information can be found at www.taborcommunications.com.

---

Source: Tabor Communications