SC12, the international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, concluded Friday, Nov. 16, following the recognition of achievements by members of the supercomputing community. Among the honors presented during the conference were the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, ACM/IEEE Computer Society George Michael Memorial HPC Ph.D. Fellowship Award, several competitive challenges, best paper and best poster awards.

Held at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, this year’s conference set an all-time record for technical program submissions. Overall conference attendance was over 9,700. In addition, 338 exhibitors filled the conference’s 365,000 square feet of exhibit hall space in the convention center.

“This year’s SC continued in the long tradition of providing HPC researchers and scientists a forum for discovery,” said Jeff Hollingsworth, SC12 general chair. “The discussions and collaborations sparked at SC12 will lead to new ideas and innovations for years to come. My special thanks to all the volunteers who contributed to SC12 and my congratulations to those honored for their outstanding achievements and contributions to the community.”

The following individuals and organizations were recognized with awards:

ACM Gordon Bell Prize Winner (for scalability and sustained performance)

"4.45 Pflops Astrophysical N-Body Simulation on K computer - The Gravitational Trillion Body Problem" by Tomoaki Ishiyama (University of Tsukuba), Keigo Nitadori (University of Tsukuba), Junichiro Makino (Tokyo Institute of Technology)

George Michael Memorial HPC Ph.D. Fellowship

Fellowship Winners: Amanda Peters Randles (Harvard University) and Ryan Gabrys (University of California Los Angeles)

Honorable Mention: Gagan Gupta (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Yanhua Sun (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Best Paper

"A Framework for Low-Communication 1-D FFT" by Ping Tak Peter Tang (Intel), Jongsoo Park (Intel), Daehyun Kim (Intel), Vladimir Petrov (Intel)

Best Student Paper (for original work primarily by students)

“Characterizing and Mitigating Work Time Inflation in Task Parallel Programs" by Stephen L. Olivier (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Bronis R. de Supinski (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Martin Schulz (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and Jan F. Prins (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Best Poster

"Visualization for High-Resolution Ocean General Circulation Model via Multi-Dimensional Transfer Function and Multivariate Analysis" by Daisuke Matsuoka (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology), Fumiaki Araki (Japan Agency for Marine-Eary Science and Technology), Shinichiro Kida (Japan Agency for Marine-Eary Science and Technology), Hideharu Sasaki (Japan Agency for Marine-Eary Science and Technology), and Bunmei Taguchi (Japan Agency for Marine-Eary Science and Technology)

ACM Graduate Student Research Competition

Gold: "Optimus: A Parallel Optimization Framework with Topology Aware PSO and Applications" by Sarat Sreepathi (North Carolina State University)

Silver: "Performing Cloud Computation on a Parallel File System" by Ellis Wilson (Pennsylvania State University)

Bronze: "Norm-Coarsened Ordering for Parallel Incomplete Cholesky Preconditioning" by Joshua Booth (Pennsylvania State University)

ACM Undergraduate Student Research Competition

Gold: "Pay as You Go in the Cloud: One Watt at a Time" by Kayo Teramoto (Yale University)

Silver:  "On the Cost of a General GPU Framework - The Strange Case of CUDA 4.0 vs. CUDA 5.0" by Matthew Wezowicz (University of Delaware)

Student Cluster Competition

Standard Track Overall Winner - University of Texas at Austin with vendor partner Dell

Student Cluster Competition, Standard Track Highest LINPACK Performance - National University of Defense Technology, China with vendor partner Inspur

Student Cluster Competition, Pilot Track Overall Winner - University of Utah

SC12, sponsored by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE Computer Society, offers a complete technical education program and exhibition to showcase the many ways high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in scientific discovery, research, education and commerce. This premier international conference includes a globally attended technical program, workshops, tutorials, a world class exhibit area, demonstrations and opportunities for hands-on learning.