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SC2002 Gordon Bell Awards to Highlight Unprecedented HPC Accomplishments
BALTIMORE, November 7, 2002 -Winners of the Gordon Bell Awards, one of high performance computing's most prestigious honors, will be announced at SC2002 in Baltimore on Nov. 21. The Gordon Bell Prizes are awarded each year at the annual SC conference to recognize outstanding achievement in the field.

"This year is simply one of the most dramatic in the history of the prize," said Gordon Bell Awards Committee Chair Thomas Sterling of Caltech. "The Gordon Bell Awards reflect and encourage progress in the field. They are unique in that they recognize-in a broad sense-how quickly the field changes from year to year."

Established in 1988, the $5,000 prize is donated by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in computer architecture, parallel processing, and high performance computing. The goal of the awards are to stimulate future advances of parallel computing applications by identifying major accomplishments and tracking progress over time.

Gordon Bell Awards can be made 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.

Two technical paper sessions will be devoted to this year's finalists. Gordon Bell I will be Wednesday, Nov. 20, at 8:30 a.m. and Gordon Bell Earth Simulator will be Thursday, Nov. 21, at 10:30 a.m. For details on these sessions, see and click on "Technical Papers."

This year's finalists, selected by a five-person committee from more than 30 entries, are:

  • 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.
  • A 29.5 Tflops Simulation of Planetesimals in Uranus-Neptune Region on GRAPE-6
    Authors: Junichiro Makino, Toshiyuki Fukushige, Hiroshi Daisaka, University of Tokyo; Eiichiro Kokubo, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. A massive 29.5 Tflops simulation of the early evolution of the Uranus-Neptune region demonstrated the potential of GRAPE-6, a system capable of 63.4 Tflops that was specifically designed for astrophysics applications.
  • 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. 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

More about the Gordon Bell Awards can be found at under "Awards."

SC2002, the annual high performance networking and computing conference, brings together scientists, engineers, educators, visualization artists, programmers, and business leaders to share ideas and glimpse the future of high performance networking and computing, data analysis and management, visualization, and computational modeling. SC2002 is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society and by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture. For more information, please see .

Media Contact:
Karen Green, kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
217-265-0748

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