San Diego Supercomputer Center Receives Honors in 2022 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards

Published November 15, 2022

The San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego has been recognized in the annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards, presented at the 2022 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC22), in Dallas, Texas. The list of winners was revealed at the SC22 HPCwire booth, as well as on the HPCwire website.

SDSC received the following honors:

• Readers’ Choice Award for Best Use of HPC in the Cloud (Use Case)

  The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a gigaton-scale collaboration including San Diego Supercomputer Center and University of Wisconsin-Madison, is using Google Cloud, Google Kubernetes Engine, and GPU sharing among Nvidia GPUs in Google Kubernetes Engine to expand the Open Science Grid to help detect neutrinos at the South Pole. Sharing increased job throughput by about 40%.

• Readers’ Choice Award for Best Use of HPC in Energy

  A graduate student at UC San Diego, working with an international team of researchers, used the Comet system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center to explore methane storage applications. They validated the use of computational chemistry as a tool to design new porous carbon materials for methane storage applications – a key bridging technology to reduced-carbon chemical fuels for vehicles.

• Editors’ Choice Award for Best Use of HPC in Response to Societal Plights (Urgent Computing, COVID-19)

  Researchers from the University of California Riverside (UCR), using supercomputing power at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), investigated methods of removing nonbiodegradable “forever chemicals” like perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) from drinking water. The research relied on SDSC’s Comet supercomputer, a 2.76-peak petaflops system, supplied by Dell.

• Editors’ Choice Award for Best Use of HPC in Response to Societal Plights (Urgent Computing, COVID-19)

  Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and UC San Diego, in partnership with San Diego County's Health and Human Services Agency (HHSA), developed computational tools to plan for COVID-safe school operations. The Geographically assisted Agent-based model for COVID-19 Transmission (GeoACT) was designed for use on the center's Comet and Expanse supercomputers (both built by Dell).

• Editors’ Choice Award for Best Use of HPC in Physical Sciences

  Purdue University researchers’ simulations with XSEDE systems at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Texas Advanced Computing Center reproduced sound waves to manage heat and stress in fluid flow. Scientists used Bridges-2 at PSC (built by HPE), and then Comet at SDSC and Stampede2 at TACC (both Dell systems), to build and then run massive simulations.

The coveted annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards are determined through a nomination and voting process with the global HPCwire community, as well as selections from the HPCwire editors. The awards are an annual feature of the publication and constitute prestigious recognition from the HPC community. They are revealed each year to kick off the annual supercomputing conference, which showcases high performance computing, networking, storage and data analysis.

 “The 2022 Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards are exceptional, indeed. Solutions developed with HPC led the world out of the Pandemic, and we officially broke the Exascale threshold — HPC has now reached a billion, billion operations per second!” said Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications, publishers of HPCwire. “Between our worldwide readership of HPC experts and the most renowned panel of editors in the industry, the Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards represent resounding recognition of HPC accomplishments throughout the world. Our sincerest gratitude and hearty congratulations go out to all of the winners.

Frank Würthwein, director of SDSC, which is privileged to be an HPCwire Awards winner for 11 years, said, “I commend Tabor Communications for its commitment to elevating high performance computing and its community of practitioners in the domains of data science, science and engineering, and more. We are extremely grateful and honored to be recognized again this year with multiple awards.”

More information on these awards can be found at the HPCwire website or on Twitter through the hashtag #HPCwireAwards.

For further information, contact:
Lara Kisielewska
Chief Marketing Officer
Tabor Communications
lara@taborcommunication.com

San Diego Supercomputer Center

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is a leader and pioneer in high-performance and data-intensive computing, providing cyberinfrastructure resources, services and expertise to the national research community, academia and industry. Located on the UC San Diego campus, SDSC supports hundreds of multidisciplinary programs spanning a wide variety of domains, from astrophysics and earth sciences to disease research and drug discovery.

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