TACC Receives Six Honors in 2022 HPCwire Readers and Editors Choice Awards

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has been recognized in the annual HPCwire Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards presented at the 2022 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC22) in Dallas.

The list of winners was revealed at the SC22 HPCwire booth and on the HPCwire website.

TACC was recognized with the following six honors:

Readers' Choice: Outstanding Leadership in HPC

Dan Stanzione is the Executive Director of TACC and the Associate Vice President for Research at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). As the leader of a world-class academic supercomputing center, Stanzione has led with integrity, an unequaled analytical mind, and a clear vision of where HPC and computational science is heading.

Readers' Choice: Best Use of HPC in Physical Sciences

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration teamed with TACC to produce the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The image was made possible through a data-driven approach that combined observations from radio telescopes. The data analysis was completed on the Frontera supercomputer.

Readers' Choice: Best Use of HPC in Life Sciences

Researchers at UT Austin developed an enzyme to break down plastics in just hours or days rather than years. TACC's Maverick2 supercomputer powered deep learning models that generated novel mutations to a natural enzyme to predict which mutations would result in the plastic-eating enzyme.

Readers' Choice: Best HPC Collaboration (Academia/Government/Industry)

Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scientists with the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Collaboration are using supercomputers to analyze how some of the earliest galaxies were formed. They identified an object that may be one of the earliest galaxies ever observed using TACC's Frontera and Stampede2 supercomputers.

Editors' Choice: Best Use of HPC in Physical Sciences

Purdue University researchers' simulations with systems at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and TACC reproduced sound waves to manage heat and stress in fluid flow. Scientists used Bridges-2 at PSC, and then Comet at SDSC and Stampede2 at TACC to run massive simulations.

Editors' Choice: Best Use of High Performance Data Analytics & Artificial Intelligence

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are using the Frontera supercomputer at TACC and Bridges-2 at PSC to develop machine-learning-driven robotic production of MRI contrast agents — a path toward improving MRI images.

The annual HPCwire Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards are determined through a nomination and voting process with the global HPCwire community, as well as selections from the HPCwire editors. The awards are an annual feature of the publication and constitute prestigious recognition from the HPC community. They are revealed each year to kick off the annual supercomputing conference, which showcases high performance computing, networking, storage, and data analysis.

"The 2022 Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards are exceptional, indeed. Solutions developed with HPC led the world out of the pandemic, and we officially broke the exascale threshold — HPC has now reached a billion, billion operations per second," said Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications, publishers of HPCwire.

"Between our worldwide readership of HPC experts and the most renowned panel of editors in the industry, the Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards represent resounding recognition of HPC accomplishments throughout the world," Tabor said. "Our sincerest gratitude and hearty congratulations go out to all of the winners."

More information on these awards can be found at the HPCwire website or on Twitter through the following hashtag: #HPCwireAwards.