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Catalyst supercomputer collaboration recognized by HPCWire

Catalyst (Download Image) The Catalyst supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore employs a Cray CS300 architecture modified specifically for data-intensive computing. The system is available for collaborative research with industry and academia.

The partnership that produced the first-of-a-kind Catalyst supercomputer was selected for an HPCWire "Best HPC Collaboration Between Government & Industry" award by readers and editors of the publication.

HPCWire publisher Tom Tabor presented the award to representatives from the Laboratory, Intel and Cray in the DOE booth at the SC14 supercomputing conference in New Orleans earlier this week. Matt Leininger represented LLNL. HPCWire is a leading online news service covering the high performance computing industry.

A Cray CS300 high performance computing cluster, Catalyst was developed to test big data technologies, architectures and applications.

Catalyst was used to achieve significant results related to the Graph500 listing announced earlier in the week. The Graph 500 offers performance metrics for data intensive computing or ‘big data,’ an area of growing importance to the high performance computing (HPC) community. By combining innovative research in graph algorithms and data-intensive run times, Livermore computational scientists demonstrated scalable Graph 500 performance on small clusters and even a single node.

LLNL Computer scientist Abhinav Bhatele was recognized at SC14 for his high-performance computing research (HPC) by the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing. The Young Achievers in Scalable Computing Award acknowledges individuals within five years of receiving their Ph.D. degree who have made outstanding, influential and potentially long-lasting contributions in the field of scalable computing. Abhinav’s work focuses on how researchers can use present and future HPC architectures with the highest possible efficiency.

SC14

Three LLNL interns also received awards: Dylan Wang won second place in the ACM SRC Best Poster award (undergraduate category) for work he did this past summer; Amanda Bienz won first prize in the ACM SRC Best Poster award (graduate category); and Harshitha Menon won the George Michael Memorial HPC Ph.D. Fellowship.

In other supercomputing news, the latest edition of the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful computers was released Tuesday in New Orleans. The ranking of the five most powerful systems remains unchanged from the previous list announced in June of this year. LLNL’s Sequoia remains No. 3 and Vulcan No. 9. China’s Tianhe-2 (Milky Way – 2) retained the No. 1 ranking and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan No. 2. Four of the top 10 supercomputers are at DOE laboratories.

Although the United States remains the top country in terms of overall systems with 231, this number is down from 233 in June 2014 and down from 265 on the November 2013 list. The U.S. is nearing its historical low number on the list.

The number of European systems rose to 130, up from 116 last June, while the number of systems across Asia dropped from 132 to 120. The number of Chinese systems on the list also dropped, now at 61, compared to 76 in June 2014. Over the same period, Japan increased its number of systems from 30 to 32.