HPC Innovation Excellence Awards announced by Hyperion Research

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At ISC 2017, Hyperion Research announced the newest recipients of the HPC Innovation Excellence Award. The program’s main objectives are to showcase return on investment (ROI) and success stories involving HPC; to help other users better understand the benefits of adopting HPC; and to help justify HPC investments, including for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs).

There are three awards categories, including the HPC User Innovation Award, the HPC Data Center Innovation Award; and the HPC Vendor Innovation Award. The judgement process for these awards is fair and clear.

HPC User Innovation Award Winners:

  • ArcticDEM Project: Responding to Climate Change. The project partners are the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Ohio State University, PGC, the University of Colorado in Boulder, and the University of Minnesota. This project is in response to the need for high quality elevation data in remote locations, the availability of technology to process Big Data, and the need for accurate measurement of topographic change. Data is used to predict sea level rise, coastal erosion, national security, civil engineering, and aircraft safety, along with many, many other science, governmental and commercial applications.
  • BP Seismic Imaging Research. BP’s Seismic Imaging Research has delivered major breakthroughs, critical in identifying over one billion additional barrels of reserves at its Gulf of Mexico offshore fields. With HPC, BP is able to test ideas quickly and scale to deliver results.
  • Celeste Project: A New Model for Cataloging the Universe. The project is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A Berkeley Lab-based research collaboration of astrophysicists, statisticians, and computer scientists is looking to shake things up with Celeste, a new statistical analysis model designed to enhance one of modern astronomy’s most time-tested tools: Sky surveys.
  • Solving Mysteries of Electrolytes in Batteries. This project is managed by the National Institute of Material Science, Center for Green Research on Energy and Environmental Materials or GREEN. Japanese scientists have synthesized two crystal materials that show great promise as solid electrolytes. All-solid-state batteries built using the solid electrolytes exhibit excellent properties, including high power and high energy densities, and could be used in long-distance electric vehicles.
  • Turning the Famous Maya the Bee Character into a 3D Film. This is an initiative from Studio 100 and M.A.R.K.13. The task required calculating each of the CGI-stereoscopic film’s 150.000 images twice – once for the perspective of the left, and once for the right eye. Given the detail-rich nature of the Maya the Bee film, the group averaged two hours per image on a single node – blazing fast in animation terms. Such times couldn’t have been achieved on a standard PC.

HPC Data Center Innovation Award:

  • NASA Modular Super Computing Facility Saves Water, Power, Money. This innovative concept, launched in January 2017, centers around an SGI/HPE supercomputer nicknamed Electra, which combines outdoor air and evapourative cooling to reduce annual water use by 99% and enable a PUE of 1.03. An imminent 28-fold system expansion is expected to save NASA about $35 million per year over alternative strategies.

HPC Vendor Innovation Award:

  • Tesla V100: Tackling Once Impossible Challenges. NVIDIA’s Tesla V100 substantially advances the firm’s chip density and is engineered to excel at AI and HPC. With 640 Tensor Cores, V100 boasts 120TF of performance on deep learning applications. See our full coverage of the Volta announcement.
  • DOME MicroDataCenter. This innovation from IBM’s Zurich Research Lab integrates compute, storage, networking, power and cooling in a package that’s up to 20 times denser than today’s typical data centre technology. DOME MicroDataCenter has no moving parts, makes no noise, and is small enough for deployment on factory floors, in doctors’ offices, and other novel HPC environments. Watch the RichReport slidecast about the MicroDataCenter.
  • Bright Computing/Microsoft Azure Integration: Function-rich and easy-to-learn. Smoothly integrating Bright’s function-rich, easy-to-learn management software into Microsoft’s important Azure public Cloud service sets the stage for running a larger spectrum of HPC workloads in a public Cloud environment, including support for InfiniBand, heterogeneous CPU-accelerator workloads, and more. Watch our interview with Bright Computing CEO Bill Wagner.

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