INDUSTRY

The CESGA-UNEX-UVIGO team has won in the Computationally Intensive Applications category of the “ITANIUM INNOVATION ALLIANCE AWARDS 09”. This award is given by the Itanium Solutions Alliance in recognition of remarkable use of supercomputers equipped with Intel Itanium processors. The awards were presented yesterday in a ceremony held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Francisco, California.

These awards recognise, in three different categories, (“Mission-Critical Data”, “Data Center Modernization” and “Computationally Intensive Applications”), the excellence of high-performance computing jobs performed on Itanium-based systems. The criteria for the selection of jobs submitted from 14 countries and five continents are primarily based on the difficulty of the computational challenge presented, the results produced and originality of the proposal.

In particular, the category in which the team CESGA-UNEX-UVIGO has won “Computationally Intensive Applications” recognises organizations that have used their Itanium-based systems to cope with enormous and critical computing loads that require high performance consistent and scalable shared resources.

The jury composed of prominent members from the industry such as Dr. Barry Hief, Scientific Director of Global Patent Identifiers, Sverre Jarp, Chief Technology Officer of CERN Openlab, or Michelle Pierce, Product Manager of Microsoft's Mainframe Migration Alliance (www.itaniumsolutions.org/itanium_innovation_awards/judges), considered CESGA worthy of the award for it use of Finis Terrae supercomputer in the analysis of massive electromagnetic computational problems, the largest with over 500 million unknowns, with multiple applications in the improvement of industrial design. CESGA used HP Integrity servers, equipped with 1.024 parallel Itanium processors and 6TB of memory to achieve this first-of-its-class solution, which was the ticket in winning this prestigious award.

The team is formed by researchers Fernado Obelleiro and José Luis Rodríguez from University of Vigo; Luis Landesa and José Manuel Taboada from University of Extremadura and Carlos Mouriño and Andrés Gómez from CESGA. They have worked in a coordinated way for years for, among others, the Spanish Army and Navantia developing systems that allow to address electromagnetic compatibility studies, aiming to detect interference between antennas, predict dangerous levels of radiation, study its radar equivalent surface, etc.