Vote now for insideHPC's HPC Community Leadership Awards

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As regular readers know, we don’t just report on HPC — we live and work in this community. And we believe strongly in the power of recognizing the people and organizations that make a difference in HPC. I’m proud to announce that this is the inaugural year for our HPC Community Leadership Awards.

The award recognizes the people and organizations who have persevered through technology, budget or organizational challenges to place innovative HPC solutions in the hands of users in business, engineering, technology, and science. A select panel of HPC rock stars (from both sides of the Atlantic) have recommended nominees in two categories this year: individual and organization. The entire list of nominees in both categories is included below, along with a short description of their contribution; as you can see, it is a remarkable field of talent.

Starting today insideHPC’s readers will vote to select only one winner from each of the two categories – the organization and the individual recognized as “the” HPC community leader. Voting will be open through October in the right sidebar on most pages of this site, and the winners will be announced during SC09. Please help spread the word about the ballot to those you work with by using the share link under the polls.

Organizations

The DOE SciDAC Program

The Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program within the Department of Energy’s Office of Science has been the most successful computational science program of the decade. Since its inception, SciDAC has made awards to 56 universities, 17 national laboratories, and three corporations. The results have been an unprecedented increase in the productivity, scalability, and accuracy of the tool, middleware, and applications use by computational scientists around the world.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA has led a dramatic change in the way our community computes by pioneering or catalyzing the development of the community, tools, education, and techniques that make HPC using GPUs a realistic option. Their efforts have also helped expand awareness of HPC into new communities, and made HPC capabilities attainable for organizations that could not previously afford them.

Oak Ridge National Lab

ORNL has been one of the highest profile supercomputer centers of recent years – in political, scientific, technology, and media arenas – thus globally raising the profile and value of high end HPC. ORNL has led the way with services, support and research that help science – not just Top500 ratings.

Texas Advanced Computing Center

The Texas Advanced Computing Center is a key resource for the academic and scientific community, and hosts some of the largest resources available to academic researchers anywhere in the world. TACC focuses on the entire science lifecycle, from numerical simulation to data analysis and storage, and has pioneered techniques and technology for the creation, management, and operation of very large scale resources in an academic setting.

Individuals

Michael Strayer

Michael Strayer is the Associate Director for Advanced Scientific Computing Research in DOE, and has been instrumental in the development and coordination of national and global efforts to advance HPC to the exascale. He was responsible for helping initiate the early exascale town hall workshops in 2007, the more formal DOE Exascale workshops in 2008 and 2009, and he also changed the game in HPC software by initiating the IESP, the International Exascale Software Project, to coordinate global resources to address HPC’s biggest challenges.

Jack Dongarra

Jack Dongarra specializes in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, the use of advanced-computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers. He has contributed to the design and implementation of the following open source software packages and systems: EISPACK, LINPACK, the BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, Netlib, PVM, MPI, NetSolve, Top500, ATLAS, and PAPI. Dongarra continues to lead the way as technology evolves – the PLASMA/MAGMA project for multi-core technology and the IESP initiative for exascale computing being great examples.

Bill Gropp

Bill Gropp’s best known legacy to the HPC community is the MPI standard. Many people suggest that node level parallelism will run out of sensible programming paradigms long before inter-node – largely due to MPI scaling well beyond the scale of resources around at the times of its introduction. Gropp can be regularly heard arguing how MPI can evolve to keep our millions of lines of ‘legacy’ applications scaling to systems with millions of cores, and he has made major contributions in hierarchical numerical methods for the numerical solution of partial differential equations. This year he lead the SC09 technical program and was a major contributor to several other conference technical programs.

Pete Ungaro

Pete Ungaro has shown over a number of years how to run a supercomputer company effectively, delivering differentiated HPC focussed products that repeatedly win competitive procurements (implying both real application performance and competitive pricing), and bringing the company back to sensible finances – and thus presenting a sustainable supplier. Ungaro has also shown a good mix of business and technology acumen, plus understanding of the unique community needs of the HPC arena.

Steve Wallach

Steve Wallach’s long career has spawned many of the most influential, and commercially successful, ideas in HPC. His innovations continue to shape our community today through his role as an advisor to some of the largest supercomputing programs in the world, involvement in the venture capital community, and his leadership of Convey Computer, his latest startup and one of the few pure play HPC hardware companies pioneering totally new methods of computing at scale.

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  1. […] is the last week for voting in insideHPC’s HPC Community Leadership Award. Full details are here, but the skinny is that we are soliciting your votes for the individual and the organization who […]

  2. […] early October insideHPC announced voting for the inaugural HPC Community Leadership awards in two categories: Individual and […]