The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recently presented the 2009 ACM Gordon Bell Prizes to four teams of scientists who created innovations in a range of applications related to high performance computing. The Gordon Bell Prizes recognises outstanding achievements in high-performance computing.
Using supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems, each of the teams demonstrated exceptional performance in the areas of space science, biological research, cognitive computing, and storage technologies. In the category of Lower Price performance, a team led by Tsuyoshi Hamada of Nagasaki University conducted simulations used to study the evolution of star clusters with unprecedented efficiency. Two awards were presented in the Special category. In the first award, David E. Shaw of D.E. Shaw Research headed a 22-person effort using Anton, a special-purpose supercomputer designed for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of bimolecular systems. The second award in this category went to a team from IBM Almaden Research Center and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LLNL).
In the Peak Performance category, Markus Eisenbach of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and his team presented a highly scalable method for calculating the thermodynamics of nanoscale systems. These systems were targeted to the nanomagnetic systems used in magnetic storage technologies such as disk drive storage, magnetic random access memory, and magnetic cellular logic.
The ACM Gordon Bell Prizes are awarded each year to recognise outstanding achievement in high-performance computing. The purpose of this recognition is to track the progress over time of parallel computing, with particular emphasis on rewarding innovation in applying high-performance computing to applications in science. Prizes are awarded for peak performance as well as special achievements in scalability and time-to-solution on important science and engineering problems and low price/performance.
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