Organizers of last month’s supercomputing SC|06 conference said it was the second largest since the meeting was first held in 1988, with more than 7,100 badged attendees filling the Tampa Convention Center. A number of finalists to the SC|06 Student Research Competition presented their research including:
Benjamin Lee, a doctoral student at Harvard University, who demonstrated a well-known statistical technique to streamline the design of microprocessors for the first time, according to the conference organizers.
“These computation engines, fabricated on a single chip, determine the processing power for high performance computing applications that are critical to the country’s large national research facilities. Lee’s innovation, which has not yet been applied in computer science architecture, reduces the number of measurements needed to build and test the microprocessors used to perform large, complex calculations. As a result, computational scientists are able to reduce the time it takes to determine the right combinations of design parameters, and improve the performance of these supercomputers. Lee estimates widespread use of these techniques in 3-5 years, with significant impacts on projects that manipulate large amounts of data in education, research and commerce,” say the organizers.
Jik-Soo Kim, a graduate student at the University of Maryland showed off a more efficient tool for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) using desktop grid applications. The organizers explain: “Grids use the resources of many separate computers connected by a network like the Internet to solve large-scale computation problems. Kim’s innovative approach uses Peer to Peer techniques to make the grid system more reliable and scalable for scientific applications or data analysis. This approach also enables collaborators at multiple sites to share computer resources easily. A prototype is being built for use by members of the NASA Deep Impact mission team, which is a complex experiment in space to probe beneath the surface of a comet.”
The full list of student winners can be found here.
Linda Leung, lleung@nww.com
