FRAMINGHAM, MA — International Data Corporation (IDC) has announced the newest recipients of the HPC Innovation Excellence Award at the SC’11 supercomputer industry conference in Seattle.
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 greatly improve ROI and scientific advancement. The award program aims to collect a large set of success stories across many industries and application areas,” said Earl Joseph, program vice president, 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.”
Winners of the initial rounds of awards, announced in June 2011, included six organizations from the U.S. and three from the People’s Republic of China.
The new award winners and project leaders announced at SC’11 are as follows (contact IDC for additional details about the projects):
Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (U.S.). Through faster computations (more than 175 times speed-up), a better understanding of networks of coordinated amino-acid variation may enable the discovery of new therapeutic targets for the hepatitis C virus (HCV). With the cost per liver transplantation in the range of $280,000 for one year, liver transplantation for hepatitis C alone reaches a total cost of nearly $300 million per year. Moreover, the average lifetime cost for hepatitis C, in the absence of liver transplant, has been estimated to be about $100,000 for individual patients. Assuming that 80% of the 4.5 million Americans believed to be infected develop chronic liver disease, the total lifetime cost for this group (3.6 million) will be a staggering $360 billion in today’s dollars. Assuming an estimated survival of 40 years, the annual health care costs for the affected U.S. population with chronic hepatitis C may be as high as $9 billion. Project leaders: David A. Lifka, Paul Redfern
Continuous Casting Consortium (U.S.). Helped by HPC resources at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Continuous Casting Consortium at the University of Illinois has developed comprehensive numerical models of the continuous casting of steel, including several ground-breaking numerical methods, to solve practical problems of interest to the steel industry. Based on the roughly 100 million tons of steel produced in the U.S. each year and the approximately $400 per ton net cost of scrapping, a one percent reduction in yield loss could would save about $400 million per year, along with energy savings during reheating of about $350 million per year. Project leaders: Seid Koric and Brian G. Thomas
Center for Development of Advanced Computing (India). C-DAC is part of the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India. C-DAC developed CHReME, an HPC application execution interface with the flexibility to create workflows and associate them with scientific applications. CHReME has been deployed at HPC sites within India and as far away as Armenia and Tanzania. The software is reducing costs by tens of thousands of dollars while improving product cycle times and increasing productivity in critical projects. Project leader: Goldi Misra
Swift Engineering (U.S.). Swift uses HPC to develop prototype vehicles for the automotive and aerospace industry must faster than these industries develop production vehicles. The customers include Toyota, for whom Swift helped develop the aerodynamic shape of the Tundra truck and the NASCAR version of the Camry; Northrup Grumman, which had Swift develop the BAT Unmanned Aerial Vehicle; Eclipse Aviation, for whom Swift developed and built a new, light business jet in only 200 days; and others. Swift can design a vehicle in one season that would take a big OEM up to four years (Swift makes prototypes, not certified production vehicles). The prototypes can save auto/aerospace firms tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in the design cycle. HPC enables Swift to explore aerodynamic design spaces 10 to 100 times faster than before, depending on the problem type. Project leader: Clayton Triggs
United Technologies Research Center/NERSC IPM (U.S.). With the help of Integrated Performance Monitoring (IPM) and staff assistance from the Department of Energy’s NERSC facility, UTRC sped up a United Technologies-owned CFD code used to simulate multiphase flows. For the first time, this enabled the simulation of realistic fuel spray-related applications Traditionally, such systems are designed by costly build-test-bust experiments due to inability to effectively model or to experimentally diagnose (measurements in the very near field of the spray are not possible due to obscuration effects). The ability to simulate this problem helps reduce design cycles substantially and provides new insights into the physics that can provide sprays with enhanced properties. UTRC has seen reductions in design cycles of at least 66%. Project leader: Marios C. Soteriou
“Innovations like this year’s award winners, from around the world and across the spectrum of technical computing, create a heart beat which feeds scientific discovery and commercial innovation, pressing the boundaries of the possible for us all. Intel salutes them for taking part in advancing the state of the computing art,” said Rajeeb Hazra. general manager, Intel Technical Computing Group.
“The Council on Competitiveness would like to congratulate all the winners of the HPC Innovation Excellence Award and thank all of those who submitted entries. The significance of HPC to the private sector will only be fully appreciated when examples such as these are recognized for their economic value,” said Dr. Cynthia McIntyre, senior vice president for the HPC Initiative at the Council on Competitiveness.
IDC welcomes award entries from anywhere in the world. Entries may be submitted at any time by completing the brief form available at https://www.hpcuserforum.com/innovationaward/. New winners will be announced multiple times each year. Submissions must contain a clear description of the dollar value or scientific value received in order to qualify. The HPC User Forum Steering Committee performs an initial ranking of the submissions, after which domain and vertical experts are called on, as needed, to evaluate the submissions.
HPC Innovation Excellence Award sponsors include Adaptive Computing, Altair, AMD, Ansys, Appro, Avetec/DICE, the Boeing Company, the Council on Competitiveness, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Ford Motor Company, Hewlett Packard, IBM, HPCwire, insideHPC, Intel, Microsoft, National Science Foundation, NCSA, Platform Computing, Scientific Computing, and SGI.
The next round of HPC Innovation Excellence Award winners will be announced at ISC’12 in June 2012
About IDC
International Data Corporation (IDC) is a global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,000 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. For more than 47 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG.