Team led by Francois Gygi wins Gordon Bell Prize

Francois Gygi, professor of applied science, led a team of researchers whose paper, "Large-scale Electronic Structure Calculations of High-Z Metals on the BlueGene/L Platform,"  was awarded the Gordon Bell Prize for Peak Performance at the 2006 ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in Tampa, Florida. 

Named for one of the founding fathers of supercomputing, the prestigious prize -- awarded each year by the Association for Computing Machinery in conjunction with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers -- recognizes outstanding achievement in high-performance computing applications. 

Peak Performance is awarded to the entry demonstrating the highest performance achieved in terms of operations per second on a genuine application program.

Gygi's team included IBM's TJ Watson Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University and the Institute of Analysis and Scientific Computing at the Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria. 

Molybdenum, a high-Z or heavy metal, is of particular interest to scientists with the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Stockpile Stewardship Program, the effort to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the nation's nuclear deterrent without underground testing. NNSA scientists use simulation to better understand the effects of aging on nuclear materials. The team used Qbox, a first principles molecular dynamics (FPMD) code, to achieve simulations of unprecedented scale and detail.  

The Qbox code demonstrated a sustained performance of 207.3 Teraflop/s (207.3 x 1012 Flop/s) using all 131,072 processors of the World's largest computer, BlueGene/L installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The award was announced at SC06 in Tampa, Fla., an international conference of high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis.