INDUSTRY

Earthquakes, Computer Speech and Biology Applications Make the Final Cut: At the SC06 international conference on high performance computing, networking, data storage and analysis, three teams will compete in the HPC Analytics Challenge to demonstrate their capabilities in using advanced data analysis techniques to solve complex, real-world problems. Under the theme "Powerful Beyond Imagination," SC06 will be held November 11-17, 2006, in Tampa, Fla. The HPC Analytics Challenge was established in 2005 to honor top technical and commercial applications developed from leading-edge, advanced analytics techniques. More than ever before, organizations in commercial, government, university and research sectors are faced with making sense of huge amounts of data. This challenge has led to the growing field of HPC analytics, the uses of technologies which allow sophisticated analysis of phenomena, data and information. In short, the field of analytics uses integrated computational technologies to support critical thinking and reasoning, leading to new insights and understanding, in the context of applied challenges. "The response to this year's challenge has been fantastic, with interest from all over the globe, and in eight distinct areas of technology," said Paul Fussell, Co-chair of the SC06 Analytics Challenge, and Senior Manager of Mathematical Modeling at Boeing Phantom Works. "The diversity and quality of the finalist submissions reflects what we have seen throughout the Challenge: every entry was noteworthy. Tuesday's final SC06 Analytics Challenge session will be very enjoyable." The HPC Analytics Challenge finalists are: -- "Remote Runtime Steering of Integrated Terascale Simulation and Visualization," in which a team from Carnegie Mellon University; the University of California, Davis; the University of Texas at Austin; and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center will demonstrate real-time, on-the-fly monitoring, interpreting and steering, from a remote laptop computer, of a 1024-processor simulation of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Southern California. -- "Computational Oral and Speech Science on E-science Infrastructures," in which a team from Osaka University, the National Institute of Information and Communication Technology, and Osaka University Dental Hospital, all in Japan, and the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research at the University of California, San Diego, will demonstrate an E-science infrastructure that enables scientists and clinicians to achieve the advanced information produced by simulations. The physical theory of sound production -- specifically speech sound -- is used to create a clinical index of disease prognostics for use in medical and dental clinics. -- "High-throughput visual analytics for biological sciences: turning data into knowledge," in which a team from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will demonstrate an end-to-end solution for processing data produced by high-throughput mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics to explore biological hypotheses. The end result is that a user can go from experimental spectra to pathway data in a single workflow, reducing time-to-solution for analyzing biological data from weeks to minutes. The three teams, selected as finalists by a panel of nine experts, will present their work at the Analytics Challenge session at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, November 14, in room 24-25 of the Tampa Convention Center. The session will conclude with the announcement of the SC06 Analytics Challenge winner. More information about the SC2006 conference, which is sponsored by IEEE and ACM, can be found at: its Web site.