Skip to main content

Ten NCSA projects nominated for HPCWire Readers’ Choice Awards


Ten research projects with connections to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) have been nominated in this year’s edition of the HPCWire Readers’ Choice Awards. These awards present an opportunity for the high performance computing community to voice their praises for deserving and innovative research.

Voting is open now. Dive into descriptions and stories about the nominated projects below:

Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement

  • NSF’s IceCube Observatory with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Stanford University, and XSEDE find the first evidence of high-energy cosmic neutrino source to pinpoint the origin of cosmic rays. (Story)
  • NCSA enables LSST to ingest, distribute, and process nightly data alerting a world-wide network of astronomers and cosmologists of new discoveries within 60 seconds of image capture. (Story)

Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement

  • Using NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer, the Southern California Earthquake Center is developing CyberShake—a new physics-based computational approach to calculating how, and where, earthquake waves will product ground motion as they propagate through the earth’s complex crust. (Story)
  • LIGO and Virgo use NCSA-enabled HPC to make the first detection of gravitational waves produced by colliding neutron stars. (Story)

Outstanding Leadership in HPC

  • William Gropp, Director, National Center for Supercomputing Applications—expert on parallel programming, author of many books and papers on MPI, and recipient of 2016 Ken Kennedy award. (Story)
  • Ed Seidel, VP for Economic Development and Innovation, University of Illinois System, and former director of NCSA. (Story)
  • William Kramer, Computer Scientist—provided organizational and technical leadership for NSF’s Blue Waters supercomputer creating productive scientific research computing environment. (Story)

Best Use of HPC in Physical Sciences

  • SDSC’s XSEDE supercomputers in collaboration with the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the University of South Florida help to design an enzyme that breaks down plastic bottles. (Story)

Best Use of HPC in Automotive

  • Rolls-Royce Corporation, Livermore Software Technology Corporation, Cray, and NCSA collaborated to enable large implicit finite element solutions to push the boundaries on solving large-scale problems and reduce time. (Story)

Best Use of AI

  • NCSA uses deep learning on Blue Waters, featuring NVIDIA GPUs, to enable faster than real-time gravitational wave discovery and new physics. (Story)

Disclaimer: Due to changes in website systems, we've adjusted archived content to fit the present-day site and the articles will not appear in their original published format. Formatting, header information, photographs and other illustrations are not available in archived articles.

Back to top