SCIENCE

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL's) Jaguar supercomputer hosted two-thirds of the finalists for this year's Gordon Bell Prize, with applications achieving extraordinary results in simulations as diverse as earthquake propagation and blood flow.

The prize has been given out each year since 1987, recognizing the world's top high-performance computing (HPC) application. Established and funded by HPC pioneer Bell and administered by the Association of Computing Machinery, it will be awarded this year on November 18 during the SC10 meeting in New Orleans. Besides the prize for sustained performance, special awards are periodically made in areas such as scalability, time to solution, and price-performance.

Finalists using Jaguar took advantage of the ORNL system and its 224,000-plus processing cores to expand the limits of scientific computing.

According to Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility Project Director Buddy Bland, their efforts attest to the ORNL system's ability to deliver ground-breaking science in a variety of domains. He noted that the last two years' Gordon Bell Prize winners also used Jaguar, with each delivering more than 1 thousand trillion calculations per second (1 petaflop) using full scientific codes.

"The entire Department of Energy Leadership Computing Program has always been about delivering solutions for some of the nation's most pressing problems, such as renewable energy production and dealing with climate change," Bland said. "These awards and finalists are using the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and Jaguar to deliver on that commitment."