AUSTIN, TX. November 17, 2015 – XSEDE announced today that multiple partners in the NSF-funded project have received top honors in the 2015 HPCwire Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards. 

 

Comet supercomputer, a science gateway serving thousands through simple, domain-specific Web interfaces.

 

  SDSC was a recipient of this year's HPCwire Editors' Choice Awards for its new Comet supercomputer, which entered production earlier this year as a result of an NSF grant worth nearly $24 million including hardware and operating funds. The award, for Best Data-Intensive System: End User focused, went to Comet for its role as a science gateway that will serve thousands of researchers through simple, domain-specific web interfaces. The award was presented at the 2015 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC15), in Austin, Texas.

   "The entire Comet team thanks HPCwire for honoring us with this award," said SDSC Director Michael Norman, who also is the principal investigator for the Comet project. "We hit the ground running following a smooth buildout and launch process, and now Comet is serving a wide range of users to help advance scientific discovery." Comet is available for use by U.S. academic researchers through the NSF's eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program, a national collection advanced, integrated digital resources and services.

 

The HERMES Logistics Modeling Team (Johns Hopkins, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and International Vaccine Access Center) for using computational modeling and simulation software to help the Republic of Benin in West Africa determine how to bring more lifesaving vaccines to its children.

 

The HERMES Logistics Modeling Team, consisting of researchers from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC), have used HERMES, their public health product supply chain modeling software, to help the Republic of Benin in West Africa determine how to bring more lifesaving vaccines to its children. The team reported its findings in the journal Vaccine. This marks a seminal achievement in HPC, as the computational modeling directly led the country to redesign its immunization supply chain to lower costs and ensure that illness and death due to vaccine-preventable diseases are averted.

 

The Pittsburgh Genome Resource Repository of large de-identified national datasets, including The Cancer Genome Atlas (1.1PB), provides a portal that fosters HPC tool use to advance cancer research and personalized medicine

 

The Pittsburgh Genome Resource Repository (PGRR) is a leading-edge information technology resource for storing, accessing and analyzing large de-identified national datasets, including The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) from NIH, all of which are important for personalized medicine. The PGRR provides a portal that allows use of these data easily with tools and HPC resources. As a managed environment, the PGRR helps researchers meet information security and regulatory requirements, provides a single consistent view of all datasets, and helps users stay current on updates and modifications made to these datasets. It facilitates the large-scale profiling of TCGA's 1.1 PB of data, comprising data on tumor samples from 11,000 cancer patients, to better understand genetic pathways and eventually enable personalized cancer treatments.

 

Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Wrangler supercomputer.

 

Wrangler is a groundbreaking data analysis and management system supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The design and implementation of Wrangler responds to developments in technology and research practice that are collectively referred to as Big Data or the Data Deluge, encompassing a variety of needs related to research data storage, analysis, and access in the sciences and engineering.

"We are proud to receive this Readers' Choice award for Wrangler--a system we designed from the ground up with the capacity and capabilities needed by today's data researchers," said Niall Gaffney, TACC's Director of Data Intensive Computing. "This award reflects that the team's efforts using many of the features of HPC, Big Data, and Cloud computing has produced a powerful and user oriented system tuned to support a wide array of data driven research domains."

 

NCSA's Private Sector Program.

 

NCSA's Private Sector Program (PSP) strives to engage industry and expand access to, awareness of, and training for HPC resources. NCSA has worked with more than one-third of the Fortune50, in sectors including manufacturing, oil and gas, finance, retail/wholesale, bio/medical, life sciences, astronomy, agriculture, technology, and more. NCSA's Private Sector Program currently boasts 26 partners. PSP's core mission is to help its partner community gain a competitive edge through expert use of modern, high-performance digital and human resources. Traditional projects are now complemented by: dedicated, non-government high-performance computing resources, including the iForge cluster; a high-tech, mobile consulting team; software/hardware benchmarking and development in production environments; code-performance teams; public-private partner leadership, and blended partner applied research and development.

 

About the HPCwire Readers' Choice and Editors' Choice Awards

The highly coveted HPCwire Readers' Choice and Editors' Choice Awards winners are selected by a polling of HPCwire's global audience for the Readers' Choice, combined with winners selected by a panel of editors, staff executives and HPC luminaries for the Editor's Choice. The formal presentation of the awards takes place during the week of the Supercomputing Conference each year, which focuses upon high performance computing, hardware, software, networking, storage, and scientific breakthroughs. Widely recognized as one of the most prestigious awards presented during the conference, the awards honor demonstrated excellence and outstanding technological advancements achieved by the HPC community.

 

About HPCwire

HPCwire is the leader in world-class journalism for HPC. With a legacy dating back to 1986, HPCwire is recognized worldwide for its breakthrough coverage of the fastest computers in the world and the people who run them. Science, business, and industry professionals worldwide have established HPCwire as the industry's leading news authority for information and intelligence across a broad range of advanced computing technologies. For topics ranging from the latest trends and emerging technologies, to expert commentary, in-depth analysis, and original feature coverage, HPCwire delivers it all as the HPC communities' most reliable and trusted resource.

 

About XSEDE

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world. It is a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data, and expertise. XSEDE accelerates scientific discovery by enhancing the productivity of researchers, engineers, and scholars by deepending and extending the use of XSEDE's ecosystem of advanced digital services and by advancing and sustaining the XSEDE advanced digital infrastructure. XSEDE is a five-year, $121-million project and is supported by the National Science Foundation.