PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD The annual Gordon Bell Prize awards for 2009 were given by the Association for Computing Machinery at the recent Supercomputer 2009 conference for the most innovative, highest performance and most performance per dollar in a supercomputer.
Four Gordon Bell prizes were awarded this year at the conference (Nov. 14-20, Portland, Ore.). The Gordon Bell prizes have been awarded for outstanding achievement in supercomputing since 1987, including a financial award of $10,000. Three categories are honored: special use of innovative techniques on real-world applications, the peak performance achieved in terms of operations per second and the best price/performance ratio as measured in megaflop/second per dollar.
This year IBM won in the special category for its cognitive computing efforts in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SYNAPSE) program as described in the paper titled: "The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Cortical Simulations with 109 Neurons, 1013 Synapses."
The paper describes a massively parallel brain simulator for the cerebral cortex, called C2, that uses Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories' Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer with 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of main memory. The system simulates the functions of 1.6 billion neurons and 8.87 trillion synapses in the gray matter of a cat-sized brain.
Also in the special category, D.E. Shaw Research was awarded for its special-purpose supercomputer designed to simulate the molecular dynamics (MD) of biomolecular systems, described in a paper titled: "Millisecond-Scale Molecular Dynamics Simulations on Anton." The specialized architecture of this supercomputer for the first time made it possible to simulate biological molecules at the atomic level for a period of about a millisecond—100 times longer than previously possible.
In the peak performance category, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Florida State University, ETH Zürich, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and Cray shared a prize for their Cray XT5 system at ORNL, which sustained 1.03 petaflops per second in double precision on 147,464 cores running an atomic-scale thermodynamics of nanoscale system simulation.
In the low-price/performance category, Nagasaki University, the University of Bristol, Riken Research, Nagasaki University and the University of Electro-Communications shared a prize for achieving 124 megaflops per dollar for the hierarchical N-body simulation on a cluster of 256 graphic-processing units (GPUs), as described in the paper titled: "42 TFlops Hierarchical N-body Simulations on GPUs with Applications in Both Astrophysics and Turbulence."
Gordon Bell was architect of the PDP and VAX minicomputers at the now defunct Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), a director at the National Science Foundation and a researcher at Microsoft Research.
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