Ghattas team wins Gordon Bell Prize, Biros students take other top supercomputing awards

A team of University of Texas at Austin computational researchers with collaborators from NYU, IBM, and Caltech have won the $10,000 ACM Gordon Bell Prize in High Performance Computing. Supercomputing’s most prestigious prize was presented to ICES Professor Omar Ghattas and collaborators Nov. 19 during SC15, which was held this year in Austin.

The team's paper is entitled “An Extreme-Scale Implicit Solver for Complex PDEs: Highly Heterogeneous Flow in Earth’s Mantle.” The team includes ICES student Johann Rudi, former ICES research scientist Georg Stadler (now a professor at NYU), and former ICES student Tobin Isaac (now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago). The project's paper appears online.

The Gordon Bell Prize recognizes the extraordinary progress made each year in the innovative application of parallel computing to challenges in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics. Prizes may be awarded for peak performance or special achievements in scalability and time-to-solution on important science and engineering problems. Financial support of the $10,000 prize is made possible by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing and past winner of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Seymour Cray Award for his exceptional contributions in the design of several computer systems that changed the world of high performance computing.

Gordon Bell prize finalists are selected by a committee comprising past Gordon Bell winners, as well as leaders in the field of high performance computing. Solving an important scientific or engineering problem in HPC is important, but scientific outcomes alone are not sufficient for this prize—finalists are selected from submissions that describe the innovations of the project, detail the performance levels achieved on one or more real-world applications, and outline what the implications of the approach are for the broader HPC community.

Dhairya Malhotra, a student studying under ICES Professor George Biros won the ACM IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial Fellowship, a $5,000 award.

Amir Gholami, another student studying under ICES Professor George Biros won the Gold Prize in the ACM Student Research Competition for his poster.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center won the Visualization Award.