Fast, fast, fast: SCD staff win Gordon Bell Award honorable mention

Top guns Rich Loft, Steve Thomas, and John Dennis, software engineers in SCD's Computational Science Section, took home $500 and honorable mention in the "Special" category of the IEEE/Gordon Bell Prize competition last week at SC01.

Rich, Steve, and John developed a scalable, 3D climate-model dynamical core based on spectral elements that achieves a higher than normal percentage of peak on microprocessors. Their code achieved 15.7% (127 gigaflops) at NCAR using 134 four-processor IBM SP nodes, and 16.1% (370 gigaflops) at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center using 128 sixteen-processor IBM SP nodes. This represents a significant speedup, as climate codes generally attain only 5-10% of peak on distributed shared-memory architectures.

The IEEE/Gordon Bell Prizes were established to reward practical uses of parallel processing and are given for the best performance improvement in an application. They are considered to be the most prestigious awards in supercomputing,

Photo: Lynda Lester/SCD