Awardees at SC14

Supercomputing is the venue for recognizing major accomplishments and significant contributions to high performance computing on an international level.  It honors the life-long achievements of outstanding individuals who have performed groundbreaking research in a range of related areas from hardware, software, and algorithms to HPC practice and community engagement.  It also recognizes young researchers and outstanding recent scientific accomplishment. SC14 honored many of its awardees in a plenary session.

Major IEEE and ACM awards honored the extensive accomplishments of individuals who have made a significant difference to the field. The SC14 awardees are as follows:

• Gordon Bell received the Seymour Cray Award, recognizing innovative contributions to HPC systems that best exemplify the creative spirit of Seymour Cray.
• Satoshi Matsuoka (Tokyo University of Technology) received the Sidney Fernbach Award, recognizing innovative uses of HPC in problem solving.
• Charles Leiserson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) received the Ken Kennedy Award, recognizing substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and considerable community service or mentoring contributions.

The ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship honors exceptional PhD students whose research focus is on high-performance computing applications, networking, storage, or large-scale data analysis using the most powerful computers that are currently available.  SC14 also hosted the ACM student research competition awards, selected in a rigorous peer-review process from student-developed posters and a short presentation.

• The 2014 George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship award went to Alexander Breuer of Germany for his work on “Petascale High Order Earthquake Simulations”.

• Best ACM student research competition, graduate category: "Reducing Network Contention Associated with Parallel Algebraic Mulitgrid" by Amanda Bienz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
• Best ACM student research competition, undergraduate category: "Comparing Decoupled I/O Kernels versus Real Traces in the I/O Analysis of the HACC Scientific Applications on Large-Scale Systems" by Sean McDaniel, University of Delaware 

In addition to the Society awards, SC provides awards that recognize outstanding research in several categories. The SC14 awards were as follows:

• Best paper: “IndexFS: Scaling File System Metadata Performance with Stateless Caching and Bulk Insertion” by Kai Ren, Qing Zheng, Swapnil Patil and Garth Gibson from Carnegie Mellon University.
• Best student paper: “Slim Fly: A Cost Effective Low-Diameter Network Topology” by Maciej Besta and Torsten Hoefler from ETH Zurich.
• Best Visualization Award:  “Visualization of Energy Conversion Processes in a Light Harvesting Organelle at Atomic Detail” by Angela Barragan, Boon Chong Goh, Barry Isralewitz, Bo Liu, James Phillips, Klaus Schulten, Melih Sener, Abhishek Singharoy, John Stone, Ivan Teo and Kirby L. Vandivort from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, C. Neil Hunter from the University of Sheffield and Lena F. Kourkoutis, Cornell University.
• Best poster: “Parallel High-order Geometric Multigrid Methods on Adaptive Meshes for Highly Heterogeneous Nonlinear Stokes Flow Simulations of Earth’s Mantle” by Johann Rudi, Hari Sundar, Tobin Isaac Georg Stadler, Michael Gurnis and Omar Ghattas from the University of Texas, Austin.

The conference also recognizes work that has had a major lasting influence on the HPC discipline via its Test of Time award. The 2014 winners of this award are Bruce Hendrickson and Rob Leland of Sandia National Laboratories for their 1995 paper entitled: “A Multi-level Algorithm for Partitioning Graphs”.

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize is awarded annually for outstanding team achievement in high-performance computing, with particular emphasis on the innovative application of High Performance Computing to problems in science and engineering. This year, Gordon Bell was on hand to present the award, which went to a team from DE Research for their paper on:

• “Anton 2: Raising the Bar for Performance and Programmability in a Special-Purpose Molecular Dynamics Supercomputer”. The winners are:  David E. Shaw, J.P. Grossman, Joseph A. Bank, Brannon Batson, J. Adam Butts, Jack C. Chao, Martin M. Deneroff, Ron O. Dror, Amos Even, Christopher H. Fenton, Anthony Forte, Joseph Gagliardo, Gennette Gill, Brian Greskamp, C. Richard Ho, Douglas J. Ierardi, Lev Iserovich, Jeffrey S. Kuskin, Richard H. Larson, Timothy Layman, Li-Siang Lee, Adam K. Lerer, Chester Li, Daniel Killebrew, Kenneth M. Mackenzie, Shark Yeuk-Hai Mok, Mark A. Moraes, Rolf Mueller, Lawrence J. Nociolo, Jon L. Peticolas, Terry Quan, Daniel Ramot, John K. Salmon, Daniele P. Scarpazza, U. Ben Schafer, Naseer Siddique, Christopher W. Snyder, Jochen Spengler, Ping Tak Peter Tang, Michael Theobald, Horia Toma, Brian Towles, Benjamin Vitale, Stanley C. Wang, Cliff Young.

The SC conference places great emphasis on the awards and SC14 treated its attendees to a number of outstanding awards talks. As awards co-chairs, we were privileged to host the invited awards talks and the presentation ceremony.  This year, too, we were especially honored by the presence of Gordon Bell at the awards ceremony.

Barbara Chapman
John Grosh