DENVER, Nov. 13, 2017 ­– HPCwire, the leading publication for news and information for the high performance computing industry, announced the winners of the 2017 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards at the Supercomputing Conference (SC17) taking place this week in Denver, CO. Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications Inc., unveiled the list of winners just before the opening gala reception.

“HPCwire’s readership is broadly diversified; it includes industry leaders from the private sector, innovators in academia, and end users that are bringing HPC to the enterprise,” said Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications, publisher of HPCwire. “Being selected to win either a Readers’ or Editors’ Choice Award is no small feat. This success signifies support and recognition from the HPC community along with the industries it serves. It is both an honor and privilege to once again engage with our readership and allow their voices to be heard. We extend a sincere thank you to our readers for their nominations and votes and a heartfelt congratulations to this year’s winners.”

HPCwire has designated two categories of Awards: (1) Readers’ Choice, where winners have been determined through election by HPCwire readers, and (2) Editors’ Choice, where winners have been selected by a panel of HPCwire editors and thought leaders in HPC. The process started with an open nomination process, with voting taking place throughout the month of September. These awards are widely recognized as being among the most prestigious recognition given by the HPC community to its own each year.

 

The 2017 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Award winners are:

 

Best Use of HPC in Life Sciences

Readers’ Choice: A team from Cardiff, Swansea, Warwick and Birmingham Universities conduct real-time analysis of Zika genomes using CLIMB cloud computing, supported by Lenovo, OpenStack, IBM, Red Hat and Dell EMC

Editors’ Choice: UCSD Department of Pharmacology, SDSC & PSC identified structural changes activating the gene-splicing technology, CRISPR-Cas9

 

Best Use of HPC in Physical Science

Readers’ Choice: NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) with Ames Research Center performed first-ever simulations using StellarBox to simulate surface dynamics

Editors’ Choice: SEAS team at Univ. of Illinois using NCSA’s Blue Waters produced the first accurate high-resolution digital elevation data/maps for entire Arctic

 

Best Use of HPC in Manufacturing

Readers’ Choice: National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) with RIKEN AICS clarify long-standing issues and advance development of next-generation batteries

Editors’ Choice: HPC4Mfg project by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s NERSC helps paper companies cut costs by 10-20% through simulations

 

Best Use of HPC in Energy

Readers’ Choice: PSC and Texas A&M use OpenFOAM on PSC Bridges & TACC’s Stampede to better understand coolant & heat transfer in high temperature jet reactors

Editors’ Choice: Carnegie Clean Energy & Univ. of Western Australia with Pawsey Supercomputing Center and Cray capture & convert ocean wave energy

 

Best Use of HPC in Automotive

Readers’ Choice: Exa PowerFLOW 5.4 ensures vehicle performance by helping engineers understand effects of variable road conditions on vehicle performance, fuel efficiency & range

Editors’ Choice: Sauber Formula One using HPE HPC solutions to lower overall IT operating expenses while improving business

 

Best Use of HPC in Financial Services

Readers’ Choice: Solarflare cuts electronic trading latency by 10X to 20-30 nanoseconds using its proprietary TCPDirect zero-copy API

Editors’ Choice: Large financial services company significantly improves and modernizes analytics environment using a DDN solution for SAS Grid

 

Best Use of HPC in Entertainment

Readers’ Choice: Disney uses of Intel Xeon-based servers & Red Hat Linux EL7 to produce Zootopia

Editors’ Choice: LucasFilm & Industrial Light Magic developed MaterialX library for computer graphics & used MaterialX when making ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ and ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’

 

Best Use of HPC in the Cloud

Readers’ Choice: Boom Supersonic uses Rescale’s ScaleX cloud HPC platform and NASA simulation tools to design supersonic passenger jet

Editors’ Choice: UberCloud with representatives from Stanford University, Dassault/SIMULIA, Advania, Intel and HPE contributing to the Living Heart Project

 

Best Use of High Performance Data Analytics

Readers’ Choice: Vestas optimized wind turbines using Lenovo NextScale and TIBCO Spotfire to reduce its “Loss Prevention Factor”

Editors’ Choice: PSC’s Bridges facilitates assembly and analysis of large-scale genomics data

 

Best Use of AI

Readers’ Choice (TIE): Using SDSC’s Comet supercomputer, SUNY Downstate researchers lead the development of realistic “biomimetic neuroprosthetics”

And

CMU School of Computer Science “Libratus” AI on PSC’s “Bridges” wins Brains vs. AI competition

Editors’ Choice: CANcer Distributed Learning Environment (CANDLE) leverages the Cray “Theta” XC40 system to develop and use deep learning tools to accelerate cancer research (ANL, LANL, LLNL, NIH/NCI, ORNL)

 

Top Energy-Efficient HPC Achievement

Readers’ Choice: NASA saves energy and water with new modular supercomputing facility

Editors’ Choice: TSUBAME 3.0 and Tokyo Institute of Technology establish new record for supercomputing energy efficiency and top the Green500 List

 

Best HPC Server Product or Technology

Readers’ Choice (TIE): HPE Apollo 6000 Gen10 System

And

Lenovo SD530

Editors’ Choice: Cray XC50 Supercomputer

 

Best HPC in the Cloud Platform

Readers’ Choice: Microsoft Azure Big Compute Infrastructure

Editors’ Choice (TIE): Microsoft Azure Big Compute Infrastructure

And

Penguin Computing on Demand

 

Best HPC Storage Product or Technology

Readers’ Choice: Lenovo Distributed Storage Solution for IBM Spectrum Scale (DSS-G)

Editors’ Choice: DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine (IME)

 

Best HPC Programming Tool or Technology

Readers’ Choice: Singularity HPC-optimized container solution for Linux

Editors’ Choice: Intel Parallel Tools

 

Best HPC Visualization Product or Technology

Readers’ Choice: NASA Hyperwall Visualization Tool for exploring petascale ocean circulation data

Editors’ Choice: NVIDIA IndeX

 

Best HPC Interconnect Product or Technology

Readers’ Choice (TIE): Intel Omni-Path Architecture

And

Mellanox 200Gb/s HDR InfiniBand

Editors’ Choice: NVIDIA NVLink

 

Best HPC Cluster Solution or Technology

Readers’ Choice: Slurm

Editors’ Choice: IBM Spectrum LSF Suites

 

Best HPC Collaboration (Academia/Government/Industry)

Readers’ Choice: A team from Cardiff, Swansea, Warwick and Birmingham Universities conduct real-time analysis of Zika genomes using CLIMB cloud computing, supported by Lenovo, OpenStack, IBM, Red Hat and Dell EMC

Editors’ Choice: European R&D project Mont-Blanc investigates a new type of energy-efficient computer architecture for HPC, leveraging Cavium’s ThunderX2 Arm-based processors

 

Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement

Readers’ Choice: Predictive Science & NASA for prediction of the corona for the Aug. 21, 2017 total solar eclipse

Editor’s Choice: Scientists from University of Montréal, CEA, CNRS, University Paris-Diderot and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics simulated for the first time the Sun’s magnetic 11-year cycle using Compute Canada, GENCI, & PRACE HPC resources

 

Top Supercomputing Achievement

Readers’ Choice: HPE and NASA deploy first commodity HPC system into space

Editors’ Choice: NCSA’s Dr. Seid Koric & Dr. Anshul Gupta from IBM TJ Watson Research Center demonstrated for the first time that multifrontal sparse factorization algorithm with hybrid parallelization can scale efficiently in today’s large-scale supercomputers

 

Top 5 New Products or Technologies to Watch

Readers’ Choice: NVIDIA Volta

Mellanox HDR 200G InfiniBand

Intel Omni-Path Architecture

Intel & Micron’s 3D XPoint Memory

AMD EPYC

 

Editors’ Choice: Bull Sequana X1310, with Cavium’s ThunderX2 Arm-based processors

Singularity

Intel “Ruler” form factor for Intel SSDs

AMD EPYC

NVIDIA Volta

 

Top 5 Vendors to Watch

Readers’ Choice: NVIDIA

Intel

AMD

Mellanox Technologies

Cray

 

Editors’ Choice: HPE

AMD

NVIDIA

Intel

IBM

 

Workforce Diversity Leadership Award

Readers’ Choice: Women in HPC (WHPC)

Editors’ Choice: STEM-Trek

 

Outstanding Leadership in HPC

Readers’ Choice: Dr. Nick Nystrom

Editors’ Choice: Prof. Dr. Anwar Osseyran

 

More information on these awards can be found at the HPCwire website at https://www.hpcwire.com/2016-hpcwire-awards-readers-editors-choice/, or on Twitter through the following hashtag: #HPCwireAwards.

 

About HPCwire

HPCwire is the #1 news and information resource covering the fastest computers in the world and the people who run them. With a legacy dating back to 1987, HPCwire has enjoyed a history of world-class editorial and journalism, making it the news source of choice selected by science, technology and business professionals interested in high performance and data-intensive computing. Visit HPCwire at www.hpcwire.com

About Tabor Communications Inc.

Tabor Communications Inc. (TCI) is a media and services company dedicated to high-end, performance computing. As publisher of a complete advanced scale computing portfolio that includes HPCwire, Datanami, Enterprise Tech, and HPCwire Japan, TCI is the market-leader in online journalism covering emerging technologies within the high-tech industry, and a services company providing events, audience insights, and other services for companies engaged in performance computing in enterprise, government, and research. More information can be found at www.taborcommunications.com.