PSC Receives Four HPCwire Awards

by | Nov 14, 2013 | 2013Press

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Receives Four HPCwire Awards

Awards Recognize Outstanding Achievements in Science and Technology

Monday, Nov. 18, 2013

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has received top national honors in four categories of the 2013 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards. HPCwire, the trade publication for the high performance computing (HPC) community, announced the winners at the start of the opening reception at the 2013 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC13), in Denver, Colorado.

 

PSC has been selected to receive:

Readers’ Choice Awards

Selected by vote of HPCwire’s readership

  • Best use of HPC in Life Sciences
    Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and SGI “Blacklight” – PSC’s Blacklight supercomputer has helped researchers overcome limitations in complex DNA and RNA sequencing tasks, identifying expressed genes in nonhuman primates, petroleum-digesting soil microorganisms and bacterial enzymes that may help convert non-food crops into usable biofuels.
  • Best use of HPC in “Edge” HPC Application
    Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Notre Dame University and VecNet Cyber Infrastructure (CI)– A project of PSC’s new Public Health Group and collaborators at Notre Dame, VecNet CI is building a computer system that will enable VecNet — a partnership of academic and industrial researchers, local public health officers and foundation and national decision makers — to test ideas for eradicating malaria before trying them in the real world.

Editors’ Choice Awards

Selected by HPCwire editors

  • Best Application of “Big Data” in HPC
    Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and Cray YarcData Urika “Sherlock” – PSC’s newest supercomputing resource, Sherlock is, in part, hard-wired to solve what are known as graph problems: questions concerning complex networks that can’t be understood in isolated pieces. Sherlock is busy shedding light on cancer protein and gene interactions, as well as performing smarter information retrieval in complex documents such as Wikipedia.
  • Best use of HPC in Financial Services
    XSEDE, PSC SGI “Blacklight” and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) Cray “Gordon”– Earlier work on PSC’s Blacklight enabled researchers to prove that high-volume automated traders were exploiting market reporting rules to make “invisible” trades that manipulated the markets. In October, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ changed their rules to close this loophole. Current work with Blacklight and the SDSC’s Gordon, through the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE network of supercomputing centers, seeks to make moment-by-moment analysis of market activity possible for regulators.

“We are delighted that PSC’s impact on so many diverse areas has been recognized by these distinguished awards,” says Ralph Roskies, PSC scientific director.

“These awards are a testimony to the dedicated work of our staff in systems, networking, user support, genomics, public health and graph analytics,” adds Michael Levine, PSC scientific director.

The highly coveted HPCwire Readers’ Choice and Editors’ Choice Awards winners are selected by a polling of HPCwire’s global audience for the Readers’ Choice, combined with winners selected by a panel of editors, staff executives and HPC luminaries for the Editor’s Choice. The formal presentation of the awards takes place during the week of the Supercomputing Conference each year, which focuses upon high performance computing, hardware, software, networking, storage, and scientific breakthroughs. Widely recognized as one of the most prestigious awards presented during the conference, the awards honor demonstrated excellence and outstanding technological advancements achieved by the HPC community.

“It’s an honor and a privilege to be able to publically recognize the organizations and individuals whose hard work, dedication, and efforts over the past year have contributed to scientific discoveries and new breakthroughs in emerging technologies that will benefit mankind,” says Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications Inc. “The awards represent the highest level of recognition given by the high performance computing community to its own for their contributions to the advancement of science and technology. Our warmest congratulations go out to all the recipients of this year’s awards.”

A complete list of award winners is available on the HPCwire.com website.