Hyperion Research Announces HPC Innovation Excellence Award Winners 

FRANKFURT, Germany, June 19, 2017 -- Hyperion Research (the former IDC HPC team) today announced the newest recipients of the HPC Innovation Excellence Award at ISC High Performance 2017, the major supercomputing conference being held June 18-June 22, in Frankfurt, Germany.

The awards for outstanding achievements enabled with high performance computing (HPC) are given twice a year, in conjunction with the June ISC conference in Germany and the November SC supercomputing conference held in the U.S. Details about the winners are below.

The program's main goals 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).

“While there are multiple benchmarks to measure the performance of high performance computers, there hasn't been an adequate methodology to evaluate the economic and scientific value HPC systems contribute,” said Earl Joseph, Hyperion Research’s CEO and executive director of the HPC User Forum. “These awards are designed to help close that gap by identifying HPC’s impact on increasing economic value, advancing scientific innovation and engineering progress, and, above all, improving the quality of life worldwide.”

Award Categories

There are three awards categories, two of them brand new for June 2017:

• HPC User Innovation Award. All awards since the program began in 2011 have been for HPC users. Primary judges for these awards are members of the HPC User Forum Steering Committee, an international volunteer group of HPC experts from government, academic and industrial organizations.
• HPC Data Center Innovation Award. This new category recognizes innovations, created and put into practice by HPC data center staff members that improve data center operations and/or user productivity.
• HPC Vendor Innovation Award. Also a new category, these awards are counterparts to the data center awards. They recognize innovations, created and put into practice by HPC vendors that improve data center operations and/or user productivity.

HPC User Innovation Award

• ArcticDEM Project: Responding to Climate Change (National Center for Supercomputing Applications, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Ohio State University, PGC, University of Colorado, Boulder, 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. MORE…
• 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. MORE…
• Celeste Project: A New Model for Cataloging the Universe (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. MORE…
• Solving Mysteries of Electrolytes in Batteries (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. MORE…
• Turning the Famous Maya the Bee Character into a 3-D Film (Studio 100 and M.A.R.K.13). The task required calculating each of the CGI-stereoscopic films’ 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. MORE…

HPC Data Center Innovation Award

• NASA Modular Super Computing Facility Saves Water, Power, Money (NASA). This innovative concept, launched in January 2017, centers around an SGI/HPE supercomputer nicknamed Electra, which combines outdoor air and evaporative 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. MORE…

HPC Vendor Innovation Award

• Tesla VI00: Tackling Once Impossible Challenges (NVIDIA): NVIDIA's Tesla V100 substantially advances the firm's chip density (21 billion transistors in an 815mm2 chip) and is engineered to excel at AI and HPC. With 640 Tensor Cores, V100 boasts 120TF of performance on deep learning applications. MORE…
• DOME MicroDataCenter (IBM): 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 center 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. MORE…
• Bright Computing/Microsoft Azure Integration: Function-rich, Easy-to-learn (Bright/Microsoft). 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.

About Hyperion Research

Hyperion Research is the new name for the former IDC high performance computing (HPC) analyst team. As Hyperion Research, the team continues all the worldwide activities that have made it the world’s most respected HPC industry analyst group for more than 25 years, including HPC and HPDA market sizing and tracking, subscription services, customer studies and papers, and operating the HPC User Forum. Hyperion helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make fact-based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. For more information, see http://www.hpcuserforum.com.

Source: Hyperion Research