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SC2002 Conference Concludes by Smashing Attendance Records, Rewarding
Successes in High Performance Computing and Networking
BALTIMORE, November 21, 2002— SC2002, the most successful show in
the 15-year history of the annual high performance computing and networking
conference, concluded today with awards recognizing the most outstanding
achievements and contributions in the field.
The record-breaking
conference attracted an estimated 7,200 participants to the technical
program sessions and the exhibit floor, nearly 2,000 more than last year.
The conference also featured a record 223 exhibitors with displays covering
nearly two acres.
Honors presented at
SC2002 included the prestigious Gordon Bell Awards and special recognition
for the best technical paper, the best student technical paper, and the
best research poster. SC2002 heralded the arrival of the Earth Simulator
in the Gordon Bell competition, with three of the awards being given for
applications run on the new system.
The Gordon Bell Awards,
chosen by a five-person panel from over 30 entries, are traditionally
granted in three categories: special accomplishment based on innovation;
peak performance based on operations per second; and a price per performance
ratio measured in megaflops per dollar. Winners depend on the entries
received; in some years a prize is not awarded in a given category.
Awards presented
this year were:
- The Gordon Bell
Award for Peak Performance: A 26.58 Tflops Global Atmospheric Simulation
with the Spectral Transform Method on the Earth Simulator
Authors: Satoru Shingu, Yoshinori Tsuda, Wataru Ohfuchi, Kiyoshi Otsuka, Earth Simulator Center, Japan Marine Science and Technology Center; Hiroshi Takahara, Takashi Hagiwara, Shin-ichi Habata, NEC Corporation; Hiromitsu Fuchigami, Masayuki Yamada, Yuji Sasaki, Kazuo Kobayashi, NEC Informatec Systems; Mitsuo Yokokawa, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology; Hiroyuki Itoh, National Space Development Agency of Japan. In a breakthrough predictive of the Earth Simulator's effect on climate research, scientists ran an extremely efficient 26.58 Tflops simulation of a complex climate system using an atmospheric circulation model called AFES.
- The Gordon Bell
Award for Language (special category): 14.9 Tflops Three-dimensional
Fluid Simulation for Fusion Science with HPF on the Earth Simulator
Authors: Hitoshi Sakagami, Himeji Institute of Technology; Hitoshi Murai, Earth Simulator Center, Japan Marine Science and Technology Center; Yoshiki Seo, NEC Corporation; Mitsuo Yokokawa, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. Researchers successfully completed a 14.9 Tflops run of a parallelized version of IMPACT-3D, an application written in High Performance Fortran that simulates the instability in an imploding system, such as the ignition of a nuclear device.
Three additional
papers earned Gordon Bell Awards for special accomplishment:
- 16.4-Tflops
Direct Numerical Simulation of Turbulence by a Fourier Spectral Method
on the Earth Simulator
Authors: Mitsuo Yokokawa, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute; Ken'ichi Itakura, Atsuya Uno, Earth Simulator Center, Japan Marine Science and Technology Center; Takashi Ishihara, Yukio Kaneda, Nagoya University. New methods for handling the extremely data-intensive calculation of a three-dimensional Fast Fourier Transform on the Earth Simulator have allowed researchers to overcome a major hurdle for high performance simulations of turbulence.
- Salinas: A Scalable
Software for High Performance Structural and Solid Mechanics Simulation
Authors: Manoj Bhardwaj, Kendall Pierson, Garth Reese, Tim Walsh, David Day, Ken Alvin, James Peery, Sandia National Laboratories; Charbel Farhat, Michel Lesoinne, University of Colorado at Boulder. The structural mechanics community has embraced Salinas, engineering software over 100,000 lines long that has run on a number of advanced systems, including a sustained 1.16 Tflops performance on 3,375 ASCI White processors.
- NAMD: Biomolecular
Simulation on Thousands of Processors
Authors: James C. Phillips, Gengbin Zheng, Sameer Kumar, Laxmikant V. Kale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Researchers achieved unprecedented scaling of NAMD, a code that renders an atom-by-atom blueprint of large biomolecules and biomolecular systems.
In addition
to the Gordon Bell Awards, the SC2002 Conference selects several outstanding
award winners for research papers presented during the meeting.
- The SC2002 Best
Technical Paper: Parallel Multiscale Gauss-Newton-Krylov Methods For
Inverse Wave Propagation
Authors: Volkan Ackelik and Omar Ghattas, Carnegie Mellon University; George Biros, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. The researchers presented a parallel algorithm for inverse problems governed by time-dependent PDEs, and scalability results for an inverse wave propagation problem of determining the material field of an acoustic medium. Using the algorithm, they solved a synthetic inverse wave propagation problem though a pelvic bone geometry involving 2.1 million inversion parameters in 3 hours on 256 processors. - The SC2002 Best
Student Technical Paper: Active Proxy-G: Optimizing the Query Execution
Process in the Grid
Authors: Joel Salts and Thin Kurd, Ohio State University; Alan Busman and Enrique Andrade, University of Maryland. The Grid environment facilitates collaborative work by allowing many users to query and process geographically dispersed data. Active Proxy-G is a service that is able to cache query results, to use those results for answering new incoming queries, to generate sub queries for the parts of a query that cannot be produced from the cache, and to submit the sub queries for final processing at application servers that store the raw datasets. - Best Research
Poster: Faucets: Efficient Resource Allocation on the Computational
Grid
Authors: Mani Potnuru, Sameer Kumar, Jay DeSouza, Sindhura Bandhakavi, and Laxmikant Kale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As the amount of parallel application runs have increased, so has the need to efficiently share resources across a distributed system. Faucets, which aims at supporting the metaphor of computing power as a utility, approaches the problem by treating the compute power as a commodity and by unleashing a market economy for the producers and consumers of the computational resources.
Next year's conference, SC2003, with the theme of "Igniting Innovation," will be held at the Phoenix Civic Plaza Convention Center in Phoenix, AZ, from November 15-21, 2003. The latest information can be found at http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2003/.
