SCIENCE

ISC2005, the International Supercomputer Conference which marks its 20th anniversary this year, has announced the recipients of the second annual ISC Award sponsored by IBM. ISC2005 will be held June 21-24 in Heidelberg. The leading event in supercomputing in Europe, ISC is a premier venue for gaining an international perspective on the field of HPC. Combining a strong lineup of technical experts with exhibits from leading hardware and software vendors and supercomputing centers, ISC2005’s focus is on “Applications, Architectures, Trends.” Established in 2004, the 2005 ISC Awards recognize and reward innovative supercomputing researchers who have distinguished themselves through state-of-the-art projects in tools and techniques for code optimization on HPC systems, data management on distributed systems and grids, and high performance I/O. All three winners will be awarded a two-way rack mountable IBM eServer OpenPower system fully configured as a building block for a cluster. The recipients of the 2005 ISC Award are: Jean-Pierre Panziera and John Baron for “A Highly Efficient Linpack Implementation Based on Shared-Memory Parallelism “ Panziera, principal engineer for Silicon Graphics Inc. in France, will discuss an efficient implementation of the classical Linpack NxN benchmark on large shared-memory systems, an approach which allowed NASA's 20x512p Columbia system to scale Linpack NxN to more than 10,000 processors with 85 percent of theoretical peak performance. Kenin Coloma, Alok Choudhary and Wei-keng Liao of Northwestern University; and Lee Ward and Sonja Tideman of Sandia National Laboratories for “DAChe: Direct Access Cache System for Parallel I/O.” Coloma, a graduate student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, will describe the team’s work in maintaining consistency and coherency in client-side caching in extremely large-scale environments. Their approach to maintaining the integrity of the distributed cache turns out to be quite scalable and offers potentially sizable performance gains. Kesheng “John” Wu, Junmin Gu, Arthur M. Poskanzer, Arie Shoshani, and Alexander Sim of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Jerome Lauret of Brookhaven National Laboratory; and Wei-Ming Zhang of Kent State University (Ohio) for “Grid Collector: Facilitating Efficient Selective Access from Data Grids.” Wu, a computer scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Scientific Data Management Research Group, will discuss Grid Collector, a system that facilitates the effective analysis and spontaneous exploration of scientific data by combining an efficient indexing technology with a Grid file management technology to speed up common analysis jobs on high-energy physics data and to enable some previously impractical analysis jobs. “We are extremely grateful to IBM for their sponsorship of the 2005 ISC Awards and for their overall support of the 2005 conference,” said Conference Chairman Prof. Hans Werner Meuer of the University of Mannheim. “It is very fitting that, as one of the global leaders in HPC, IBM supports these awards recognizing technical achievements for improving the performance and productivity of HPC isystems.” More information on their presentations and the overall conference program can be found on the ISC2005 Web site at www.isc2005.org. The annual conference is held in Heidelberg, the home of Germany’s oldest university as well as a thriving modern research community.