DENVER, Colo., Nov. 19, 2019 — The Unified Communication Framework (UCF), a collaboration of industry, laboratories and academia to create production-grade communication frameworks and open standards for data-centric and high-performance applications, today announced that the Unified Communications X (UCX) framework has won a 2019 R&D 100 award.

The R&D 100 Awards is a prestigious innovation awards program of R&D Magazine, honoring 100 top R&D pioneers and their revolutionary ideas in science and technology in the past year. The award to UCX recognizes the collaborations with Los Alamos National Laboratory, Arm, Mellanox Technologies, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Advanced Micro Devices, Argonne National Laboratory, NVIDIA, Stony Brook University, and Rice University for developing the UCX open source framework.

“We are honored to receive the 2019 R&D 100 award, recognizing the great value UCX delivers to the high-performance computing industry,” said UCF consortium chairman Jeff Kuehn of Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We appreciate the incredible effort from all the contributing organizations and companies and are excited to see the broad and increasing adoption of the UCX open source framework.”

The UCF consortium manages several open source development projects, including UCX and SparkUCX. UCX provides an open unified communication software framework that enables users to exploit the capabilities of new high-performance computing systems, meet demands for scalability on millions of cores and support applications with critical functionality.

“The UCX framework provides a high-performance network software stack, which has been successfully deployed by a variety of Arm partners, on systems ranging from embedded devices to HPC solutions,” said Eric VanHensbergen, fellow, Arm Research. “As an active contributor to UCX, Arm is honored to be part of the UCF consortium, and the 2019 R&D 100 award.”

“Argonne is proud to be part of the consortium and to have contributed to this award-winning technology,” said Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director of the Computing, Environment and Life Sciences directorate at Argonne. “This R&D 100 award is a testament to the importance of innovation in addressing the challenges of emerging extreme-scale computing, and we look forward to continuing our work with UCF on this and other co-design activities.”

“Having been part of the development of UCX from its beginning, I am extremely pleased to see how it has become widely adopted for exascale as well as by many evolving technologies,” said Steve Poole, distinguished senior scientist and chief architect at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Developed via a collaboration of industry, academic and government laboratories, and funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, UCX adoption and the R&D100 award acknowledgment demonstrate all parties’ dedication to a great technology.”

“UCX is designed to enable world-leading performance and scalability for compute and data-intensive applications, to support the open and democratic development of exascale environments and a broad range of technologies,” said Dror Goldenberg, senior vice president of software architecture at Mellanox Technologies. “We are proud to be part of the UCF consortium and to contribute to the development of UCX.”

“Receiving this award is an excellent endorsement of the hard work of our members,” said Duncan Poole, UCF board member, of NVIDIA. “Open standards continue to play an essential role to fuel cross-platform collaboration that is so important to this industry.”

“UCX is a key technology that is helping us design next-generation programming models and to improve the software stack for high-performance computing and data sciences. We are currently using the technology to explore how to improve our systems,” said Oscar Hernandez, a computer scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The 2019 R&D 100 award ceremony will take place on Thursday, Dec. 5, in San Mateo, California. Attendees of the Supercomputing 2019 conference (Nov. 18–21) in Denver, Colorado, are invited to join the UCX session and hear from UCF consortium members.

The UCX team gratefully acknowledges the continued support of the U.S. Department of Defense.

About UCF

Unified Communication Framework is an essential enabler of co-design, opening the opportunity for innovation and development of heterogeneous co-processing elements working together synergistically and seamlessly to achieve a robust and capable ecosystem for exascale computing and beyond. The emergence of many-core processing architectures, field-programmable gate arrays, interconnect intelligence and data-aware storage are just some of the key technologies that depend on the ability to effectively communicate within such a framework to realize the potential of their capabilities.

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Source: UCF