International Data Corporation (IDC) announced the fifth round of recipients of the HPC Innovation Excellence Award at the ISC’13 supercomputer industry conference in Leipzig, Germany.

HPC Innovation Excellence Award sponsors include Adaptive Computing, Altair, AMD, Ansys, Cray, Avetec/DICE, the Boeing Company, the Council on Competitiveness, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Ford Motor Company, Hewlett Packard, HPCwire, insideHPC, Intel, Microsoft, National Science Foundation, NCSA, Platform Computing, Scientific Computing, and SGI.

ADCIRC, developed at UNC by Rick Luettich, was one of 11 international winners. This system uses the coupled coastal circulation, storm surge, and wind wave model ADCIRC+SWAN to produce high-resolution forecasts of storm surge, near shore waves, and water inundation when tropical or extra-tropical storms threaten the U.S. Atlantic or Gulf Coasts. The complete system, the ADCIRC Surge Guidance System (ASGS), includes an advanced web-based display (NC-Coastal Emergency and Risk Assessment). During an active storm, ASGS is run two to four times each day on a 150-node Dell PowerEdge M610/cluster (2 x 2.8Ghz Intel Nehalem-EP 5560, quad core) at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). The outputs from these runs are incorporated into guidance and forecasting efforts by the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, and agencies such as the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, and local and regional emergency management personnel. The resulting forecasts are used for evacuation decisions, to position supplies and response personnel, for search and rescue, and for other event-based decision support as needed.

The HPC Innovation Excellence Award recognizes noteworthy achievements by users of high performance computing (HPC) technologies. The program’s main goals are to showcase return on investment (ROI) and scientific success stories involving HPC; to help other users better understand the benefits of adopting HPC and justify HPC investments, especially for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs); to demonstrate the value of HPC to funding bodies and politicians; and to expand public support for increased HPC investments.

“IDC research has shown that HPC can impact innovation cycles greatly and can potentially generate ROI. The award program aims to collect a large set of success stories across many research disciplines, industries, and application areas,” said Chirag Dekate, Research Manager, High Performance Computing at IDC. “The winners achieved clear success in applying HPC to greatly improve business ROI, scientific advancement, and/or engineering successes. Many of the achievements also directly benefit society.”