DALLAS, Texas, Nov. 12, 2018 — HPCwire, the leading publication for news and information for the high performance computing industry announced the winners of the 2018 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards at the Supercomputing Conference (SC18) taking place this week in Dallas, TX. Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications Inc., unveiled the list of winners just before the opening gala reception.

“This year is a milestone year as it marks the 30^th anniversary of SC and the 15^th anniversary of The HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards. These awards serve as a pillar of recognition in our community, acknowledging major achievements, outstanding leadership and innovative breakthroughs.” Said Tom Tabor CEO of Tabor Communications, publisher of HPCwire. “Receiving an HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award signifies an undeniable amount of community support as well as continued success. We are proud to acknowledge our winners this year and as always to allow our readers voices to be heard. I would like to personally congratulate each and everyone of our winners, as their awards come well deserved.”

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 2018 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Award winners are:

 

Best Use of HPC in Life Sciences

Readers’ Choice: The PSC Brain Image Library, with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, supported by NIH

Editors’ Choice: An international team led by SDSC and UCSD used Comet, built by Dell-EMC

 

Best Use of HPC in Physical Science

Readers’ Choice: A team from Northwestern University using PSC Bridges, Intel, NVIDIA, & HPE

Editors’ Choice: SciNet using Lenovo and Mellanox technologies

 

Best Use of HPC in Manufacturing

Readers’ Choice:  University of Birmingham with Rolls-Royce using Lenovo, SLURM, Mellanox, and IBM, supplied by OCF

Editors’ Choice: Dr. Lawrence Cheung and a GE Global Research team used computational fluid dynamics on Cray supercomputers

 

Best Use of HPC in Energy

Readers’ Choice:  PRACE, BSC and GENCI researchers

Editors’ Choice: Italian energy company Eni leverages HPE and NVIDIA technology

 

Best Use of HPC in Automotive

Readers’ Choice:  Uber Advanced Technologies Group (UATG) used ML/DL leveraging DDN storage technology

Editors’ Choice: Rolls-Royce Corporation, LSTC, Cray, and the NCSA

 

Best Use of HPC in Entertainment

Readers’ Choice: The Open Shading Language leverages Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512

Editors’ Choice: University of Notre Dame Rex & Alice A. Martin Media Center use DDN SFA7700X

 

Best Use of HPC in Financial Services

Readers’ Choice:  Solarflare, LDA Technologies, Penguin Computing and Xilinx claimed record-breaking tick-to-trade networking performance

Editors’ Choice: Verne Global announces a faster, higher-capacity and lower-cost connection directly into the heart of the U.S. financial markets

 

Best Use of High Performance Data Analytics

Readers’ Choice:  NASA Twins Study of spacefaring and earthbound astronaut twins, made possible by Bridges’ large-memory nodes. Using Bridges’ large-memory, HPE ProLiant DL580 nodes, each with 3TB of RAM and 80 Intel Xeon cores

Editors’ Choice (TIE): IBM and Stop the Traffik: IBM is working in tandem with a UK-based NGO using HPC and data analytics to fight human trafficking

And

Aerofarms and Dell Technologies create IoT/ML-driven farm

 

Best Use of AI

Readers’ Choice: CMU Libratus running on PSC Bridges using Intel Architecture and CPU’s uses AI strategic reasoning with imperfect information to improve diverse fields

Editors’ Choice: NCSA uses deep learning on Blue Waters, featuring Cray, AMD and NVIDIA technology, to enable real time gravitational wave discovery and new physics

 

Best AI Product or Technology

Readers’ Choice: NVIDIA Volta GPUs

Editors’ Choice: Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration (LiCO) 

 

Best Use of HPC in the Cloud

Readers’ Choice:  The Wellcome Sanger Institute using a private OpenStack cloud enhances IT environment necessary to sequence and assemble 100 complete human genomes per day

Editors’ Choice:  UberCloud, Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics and Microsoft Azure helped PBBL Law with first-time HPC Cloud in winning a lawsuit against the builder of residential condominium towers

 

Best HPC in the Cloud Platform

Readers’ Choice: Amazon Web Services

Editors’ Choice: Rescale ScaleX multi-cloud platform

 

Best HPC Server Product or Technology

Readers’ Choice: Cray XC50 Supercomputer

Editors’ Choice: IBM POWER9 with NVIDIA Volta

 

Best HPC Programming Tool or Technology

Readers’ Choice: Singularity

Editors’ Choice: Singularity

 

Best HPC Interconnect Product or Technology

Readers’ Choice: Mellanox HDR 200G InfiniBand

Editors’ Choice: Mellanox HDR 200G InfiniBand

 

Best HPC Collaboration (Academia/Government/Industry)

Readers’ Choice: Researchers at the NIH and University of Delaware, in collaboration with PSC and using the D.E. Shaw Research Anton 2 supercomputer, discover how drugs stop HIV maturation

Editors’ Choice:  The Exascale Computing Project is a collaborative effort by the US Department of Energy (DOE) to accelerate delivery of a “capable” exascale system 

 

Top Energy-Efficient HPC Achievement

Readers’ Choice: ORNL‘s Summit supercomputer demonstrates 13.889 GF/watt using Green500 Level 3 Measurement Fidelity.

Editors’ Choice: Under LRZ’s direction, Lenovo and Intel built the world’s largest non-accelerated, general-purpose supercomputer (SuperMUC-NG at LRZ)

 

Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement

Readers’ Choice: One year ago NASA and HPE launched the first supercomputer into space

Editor’s Choice: NSF’s IceCube Observatory with PSC, SDSC, Stanford University, XSEDE, and Globus find first evidence of high-energy cosmic neutrino source to pinpoint the origin of cosmic rays.

 

Top Supercomputing Achievement

Readers’ Choice:  ORNL, LLNL, IBM, NVIDIA & Mellanox for the launch of Summit and Sierra (#1 and #3 world-fastest supercomputers, respectively) under the CORAL acquisition project, the first-of-its-kind collaboration between the NNSA’s ASC Program and the DOE’s Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program.

Editors’ Choice:  ORNL, LLNL, IBM, NVIDIA & Mellanox for the launch of Summit and Sierra (#1 and #3 world-fastest supercomputers, respectively) under the CORAL acquisition project, the first-of-its-kind collaboration between the NNSA’s ASC Program and the DOE’s Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program.

 

Top 5 New Products or Technologies to Watch

Readers’ Choice: NVIDIA Turing GPU

Singularity

Mellanox Quantum 2000

Intel OPA 2.0

Intel for Python

Editors’ Choice: NVIDIA DGX-2

Fujitsu A64FX Arm processor

Mellanox HDR

Intel OPA 2.0

DDN A31

 

Top 5 Vendors to Watch

Readers’ Choice: NVIDIA

AMD Intel

Mellanox

DDN

Editors’ Choice: NVIDIA

AMD

Intel

Arm

IBM

 

Workforce Diversity Leadership Award

Readers’ Choice:  TACC, Cambridge University, CHPC, Dell, and the Department of Science & Technology (South Africa)

Editors’ Choice: NSF INCLUDES

 

Outstanding Leadership in HPC

Readers’ Choice (TIE):  Simon McIntosh-Smith

and

Irene Qualters

Editors’ Choice:  Thomas Zacharia

 

Best HPC Storage Product or Technology

Editors’ Choice (TIE):  DDN ES14KX Lustre appliance

and

ThinkParq BeeGFS

 

More information on these awards can be found at the HPCwire website at https://www.hpcwire.com/2018-hpcwire-awards-editors-choice/, or on Twitter through the 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.