IDC Announces New Winners of HPC Innovation Excellence Awards

AUSTIN, Tex., Nov. 17 — International Data Corporation (IDC) today announced the ninth round of recipients of the HPC Innovation Excellence Award at the SC15 supercomputer industry conference in Austin, Texas. This year’s winners come from around the globe: US-based Argonne National Laboratory, the Korean Institute of Science and Technology, and a recent start-up, Sardina Systems from Estonia. The first IDC Innovation awards were given out at ISC 2011 and since then IDC has presented over 60 Innovation Awards at two leading high performance computing (HPC) conferences – ISC and SC – to a wide range of academic, commercial, and government sites from around the world.

The HPC Innovation Excellence Award recognizes noteworthy achievements by users of high performance computing technologies. The program’s main goals are to showcase return on investment (ROI) and scientific success stories involving HPC; to help other users better understand the benefits of adopting HPC and justify HPC investments, especially for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs); to demonstrate the value of HPC to funding bodies and politicians; and to expand public support for increased HPC investments.

“IDC research has shown that HPC can accelerate innovation cycles greatly and in many cases can generate ROI. The award program aims to collect a large set of success stories across many research disciplines, industries, and application areas,” said Bob Sorensen Research Vice President, High Performance Computing at IDC. “The winners achieved clear success in applying HPC to greatly improve business ROI, scientific advancement, and/or engineering successes. Many of the achievements also directly benefit society.”

The new award winners and project leaders announced at SC15 are as follows (contact IDC for additional details about the projects):

Argonne National Laboratory (US). Researchers in the Computing, Environment and Life Sciences Directorate (CELS) at Argonne National Laboratory developed ACCOLADES, a scalable workflow management tool that enables automotive design engineers to exploit task parallelism using large-scale computing (e.g., GPGPUs, multicore architectures, or the cloud). By effectively harnessing such large-scale computing capabilities, engine design engineers can concurrently simulate the drive cycle of thousands of vehicles in the wall-time it normally takes to complete a single dyno test. According to experts from a leading automotive manufacturer, ACCOLADES in conjunction with dyno tests can greatly accelerate the test procedure yielding an overall saving of $500,000 to $1 million during the R&D phase of an engine design/development. Leads: Shashi Aithal and Stefan Wild
Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (Republic of Korea) The Department of Supercomputing Modeling and Simulation at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) runs a modeling and simulation program that offers Korean SMEs the opportunity to develop high-quality products using the supercomputers at KISTI. Through open calls, the project selects about 40 engineering projects of SMEs every year and provides technical assistance, access to the supercomputers, and the appropriate modeling and simulation software technology such as CFD, FEA etc. From 2004 to date, the project has assisted about 420 SMEs. The project recently assisted the development of a slow juicer made by NUC Corp by improving the juice extraction rate from 75% to 82.5% through numerical shape optimization of a screw by using the “Tachyon II” supercomputer and fluid/structural analysis. This helped sales dramatically increase from about $1.9 million in 2010 to $96 million 2014, and the company has hired 150 new employees through building the additional manufacturing lines. Lead: Jaesung Kim and Sang Min Lee
Sardina Systems (Tallinn, Estonia): This new company developed a technology that automates HPC operations in large-scale cloud data centers, such as collecting utilization metrics, driving scalable aggregation and consolidation of data, and optimizing resource demand to resource availability. The product, FishDirector, incorporates high performance parallel data aggregation and consolidation, coupled with high performance solvers that continuously solve for optimal layout of virtual machines (VMs) across an entire compute facility, taking into account costs such as VM movement/migration costs and constraints around placement of certain VMs, to drive higher overall server utilization and lower energy consumption The firm states that it has demonstrated raising utilization from 20 percent to over 60 percent at one government facility by optimizing the performance of over 150,000 VMs. Lead: Kenneth Tan

The next round of HPC Innovation Excellence Award winners will be announced at ISC16 in June 2016.

About IDC

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Source: IDC