NCSA Receives Honors in 2023 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications was recognized for its outstanding achievements in three different domains in the annual HPCwire Readers’  and Editors’ Choice Awards announced at Supercomputing Conference 2023 (SC23) in Denver on November 14. It’s the 13th consecutive year NCSA has been honored with an HPCwire award.

NCSA Director Bill Gropp was presented the award for “Outstanding Leadership in HPC,” one year after NCSA’s Executive Associate Director of Engagement John Towns was selected for his stewardship of the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE program.

“It’s truly an honor just to be nominated for this recognition, and I feel another level of gratitude and humility in being presented with this award,” Gropp said. “It represents everything NCSA has accomplished over the course of the year – and beyond. I’m so proud of the people we work with, the work that we do, and the lasting impact NCSA is making in the HPC community and the world at large.

“I was delighted to see NCSA’s premier supercomputing system Delta acknowledged and its team honored for their work in two different projects. We’re proud of our strong partnership with the National Science Foundation in facilitating the advanced computing resources of Delta for the research community nationwide.”

A list of all of the winners can be found on the HPCwire website. NCSA was recognized for:

• Readers’ Choice: Outstanding Leadership in HPC. William Gropp is Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, a professor of Computer Science, and holds a Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are in parallel computing, software for scientific computing and numerical methods for partial differential equations.
  
• Readers’ Choice: Best Use of HPC in Life Science. Scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago, the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) developed APACE, a computational framework as a service that optimizes AlphaFold2 to run at scale in the Delta supercomputer, reducing time-to-solution for off-the-shelf AlphaFold2 predictions from days to minutes.
  
• Editors’ Choice: Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement. Using multiple resources from NSF’s ACCESS program (San Diego Supercomputer Center’s Expanse and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ Delta), as well as numerous other computational resources, researchers at UC San Diego have been able to accurately model water phases, which has the tremendous potential to impact computational molecular science and could revolutionize our understanding of the molecular world.

The coveted 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’re announced at the start of the annual Supercomputing Conference, which showcases high-performance computing, networking, storage and data analysis.

“This year, we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of these renowned awards and the 2023 Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards are exceptional, indeed,” said Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications, publishers of HPCwire. “Throughout the world, there are pockets of brilliant scientists working on grand-challenge problems that can only be explored and solved because of HPC. Rarely do these accomplishments come to light, much less are they recognized for their achievements and contribution to society. 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 the many deep and varied HPC accomplishments throughout the world. Our sincerest gratitude and hearty congratulations go out to all of the winners.”

HPCwire is the No. 1 news and information resource covering the fastest computers in the world and the people who run them. With a legacy dating back to 1986, HPCwire has enjoyed a legacy of world-class editorial and journalism, making it the news source of choice selected by science, technology and business professionals interested in high-performance and data-intensive computing.