November 15, 2000

DALLAS, Texas - SC2000, the conference of high performance networking and computing, capped one of the most successful programs in the history of the conference by recognizing outstanding achievements and contributions in the field.

The awards were presented Thursday, Nov. 9, honoring a wide range of people and their accomplishments. The conference drew 5,065 registered attendees and 153 exhibitors for a week of demonstrations, technical presentations, informal discussions and an extensive educational program.

"Whether we judge the conference by attendance, passing comments in the aisles or the overflowing audiences for presentations, this has been one heck of a successful week," said Louis Turcotte, general chair of the SC2000 conference. "SC2000 added to the very successful foundation of the conference as the SC2001 team starts planning for next year's program in Denver."

The IEEE Computer Society, a cosponsor of the conference, presented two special awards.

The first, the Sidney Fernbach Award, was presented to Stephen W. Attaway of Sandia National Laboratories. The award is given for an outstanding contribution in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches. Attaway is an engineer who works in the field of computational mechanics for crash and impacts. He has worked at Sandia National Laboratories since 1987 and is currently a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in the Computational Solid Mechanics and Structural Dynamics Department. Attaway was named a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in March 2000.

The second award, the second annual IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, presented in recognition of innovative contributions to high performance computing systems that best exemplify Seymour Cray's creative spirit, was given to Glen J. Culler. In 1961, he and physicist Burton Fried developed the first interactive, mathematically based graphical system - allowing scientists visualize computational solutions in real-time. During his career, Culler developed the array processor, digital speech processing and the personal supercomputer. This award includes a $10,000 honorarium and is funded from an endowment provided by SGI.

Each year at SC, the Gordon Bell Prize is awarded for the best peak computer performance, the best performance-price ratio and in a special category.

Competitors for this year's prize for best performance tied, each achieving 1.34 teraflops. Tetsu Narumi, Ryutaro Susukita, Takahiro Koishi, Kenji Yasuoka, Hideaki Furusawa, Atsushi Kawai and Thoshikazu Ebisuzaki recorded 1.34 Tflops with their Molecular Dynamic Simulation for NaCl for a Special Purpose Computer: MDM. The team of Junichiro Makino, Toshiyuki Fukushige and Masaki Koga achieved1.349 Tflops with their Simulation of Black Holes in a Galactic Center on GRAPE-6.

The winners of the Price/Performance Category were Douglas Aberdeen, Jonathan Baxter and Robert Edwards for their 92 cents/Mflops Ultra-Large Scale Neural Network Training on a PIII Cluster.

Honorable Mention in the Price/Performance Category went to Thomas Hauser, Timothy I. Mattox, Raymond P. LeBeau, Henry G. Dietz and P. George Huang of the University of Kentucky for their "High-Cost CFD on a Low-Cost Cluster."

In the Gordon Bell Prize special category, Alan Calder, B.C. Curtis, Jonathan Dursi, Bruce Fryxell, G. Henry, P. MacNeice, Kevin Olson, Paul Ricker, Robert Rosner, Frank Timmes, Henry Tufo, James Truran and Michael Zingale were cited for their High-Peformance Reactive Fluid Flow Simulations Using Adaptive Mesh Refinement on Thousands of Processors.

Here is a list of other awards presented at the conference:

• Best Paper: "Is Data Distribution Necessary in OpenMPI?," Constantine Polychronopoulos, Dimitrios Nikolopoulos, Eduard Ayguade, Jesus Labarta and Theodore Papatheodorou.
• Best Student Paper: "A Comparison of Three Programming Models for Adaptive Applications on the Origin 2000," Hongzhang Shan, Princeton University.
• Best Research Gem: "Automatic TCP Window Tuning Implemented in an FTP Application," Jim Ferguson and Jian Liu.
• HPC Games Most Leading Edge Technology Prize: Jeff Moe, Jim Waggett, Kai Staats and Roy Jenevein for Black Lab Linux.
• HPC Games Most Innovative Hardware Prize: Bill Dieter, Hank Dietz, Jim Lumpp, Thomas Hauser, Tim Mattox and Todd Willey for The Aggregrate.
• HPC Games Grand Prize: James Hanna, Peter Hsieh, Robert Hillman, Walter Koziarz, Wilmar Sifre and Zen Pryk for The Red Team.
• HPC Games Most Innovative Software Prize: James Hanna, Peter Hsieh, Robert Hillman, Walter Koziarz, Wilmar Sifre and Zen Pryk for The Red Team.

A new competition sponsored by Qwest Communications International and called the SC2000 Network Challenge for Bandwidth-Intensive Applications pushed the limits of the conference's SCinet network as two teams posted peak performance figures of more than a gigabit of data per second.

Next year's SC2001 conference will be held Nov. 12-15, 2001, in Denver, Colorado.