Koric receives three HPCwire awards

Projects led by MechSE adjunct professor Seid Koric received three awards in the HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards, presented at the 2014 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC14) in New Orleans. His work was chosen as the Reader’s Choice for Top Supercomputing Achievement, and as both the Reader’s Choice and the Editor’s Choice for Best Use of a High Performance Computing (HPC) Application in Manufacturing.

Koric is the senior technical lead for industrial projects with the Private Sector Program of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

The Private Sector Program (PSP) of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) links industry partners with the resources of one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. By solving problems in applied research and commercialization, the PSP advances the fields of data-intensive computing, cybersecurity, and visualization. For 30 years, PSP has been collaborating with companies in manufacturing, oil, gas, biomedical technology, and life sciences; they have worked with more than one-third of the Fortune50®.

The award for Top Supercomputing Achievement recognizes NCSA’s PSP staff and colleagues at the Barcelona Supercomputer Center for scaling BSC’s Alya multiphysics code to 100,000 cores of NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer. This multiphysics code can simulate complex engineering problems such as airflow in human lungs, how the heart contracts, and the mechanics of combustion in a kiln furnace. On Blue Waters, Alya achieved more than 85 percent parallel efficiency.

"These unprecedented results contradict the common belief that engineering simulation codes do not scale efficiently in large supercomputers, opening a new wide horizon of potential applications in the industrial realm," Koric said.

The awards for Best Use of an HPC Application in Manufacturing recognize PSP staff, PSP partner Rolls-Royce, and storage systems company DDN for their collaboration to accelerate the simulation and modeling performance of Nastran and other data-intensive manufacturing codes. The NCSA worked to accelerate the simulation and modeling performance for data intensive manufacturing codes, which could improve the speed, agility, control and visibility of the design process. NCSA’s iForge industrial HPC system – featuring DDN’s SFA storage platform and IBM’s GPFS – has demonstrated industry-leading levels of performance and resilience with data intensive manufacturing codes, empowering Rolls Royce to develop designs better, faster and cheaper.

HPCwire, the organization who gave out the awards, is a news and information resource about the field of high performance computing. It was founded in 1986, and covers topics in HPC such as emerging technologies, new trends, and expert analysis. HPCwire conducts annual Readers’ Choice Awards to recognize the best and the brightest developments that happened in HPC over the past year. These awards are nominated and voted on by the global HPC community. They are highly coveted as prestigious recognition of achievement by the HPC community, and are given in the form of both "Readers’ Choice" and "Editors’ Choice."