1/10/2014 Katie Carr, CSL
Written by Katie Carr, CSL
At one of supercomputing’s premier international conference last November, Illinois faculty and students shone by winning four major awards, including a best paper award.
SC13, the 2013 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, is one of the top conferences in the area of supercomputing and includes a technical program, workshops, tutorials, exhibit and demonstrations. Parallel Computing Institute Director William Gropp was the 2013 conference chair, in addition to being one of the six finalists for the HPC Vanguard Award. SC13 celebrated the 25th anniversary of the conference, which was held in Denver.
Computer Science Professor and parallel computing expert Marc Snir was awarded the IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award. The Seymour Cray Award is one of the IEEE Computer Society’s top awards in recognition of innovative contributions to high-performance computing systems.
Snir is the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and previously headed Illinois’ computer science department from 2001 to 2007. His current research focuses on programming environments for high-performance computing.
Additionally, Illinois graduate student Robert Gerstenberger, now at ETH Zürich, along with Torsten Hoefler (formally of NCSA) and Maciej Besta of ETH Zürich, won the best technical paper award for their work on enabling highly-scalable remote memory access programming with MPI-3 one sided.
The research, using the Blue Waters supercomputer, was a long-term project working to standardize high performance communications on networks. Today’s modern interconnects offer remote direct memory access (RDMA) features, yet most applications rely on explicit message passing for communications. The team improved scalability and practicality of implementations of the MPI-3 specification and proved their design is comparable to, or better than, similar designs in terms of latency, bandwidth and message rate.
Other awards won by Illinois graduate students included the ACM Student Research Competition Award. Ehsan Totoni received the gold award, while Nikhil Jain received silver. As winner, Totoni will be entered into the SRC Grand Finals competition, which is judged over the Internet. In addition, Jonathan Lifflander was awarded a George Michael Memorial Fellowship, which is given to exceptional Ph.D. students working in the area of high-performance computing applications, networking, storage or large-scale data analysis using the most powerful computers available.
For more information, please visit http://sc13.supercomputing.org/content/sc13-concludes-awards-outstanding-achievements-hpc.