NEWSFLASHES

On November 18, 2019, high-performance computing (HPC) publication HPCwire released its annual Editors’ and Readers’ Choice awards. Announced during the first day of SC19, the world’s premier annual supercomputing conference, the awards honor the year’s best HPC innovations and breakthroughs. The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching near Munich won the Editors’ Choice award for “best use of HPC in energy.”

HPCwire gives awards in a variety of categories, encouraging readers to vote for the Readers’ Choice awards, and also assembles a panel of HPC thought leaders and HPCwire editors for the Editors’ Choice awards. Last year, LRZ won the Editors’ Choice award for “top energy efficient HPC achievement,” for SuperMUC-NG, the centre’s current flagship supercomputer and the first general-purpose, non-accelerated machine to be fully cooled by hot-water-free cooling, drastically reducing the centre’s energy footprint.

This year, LRZ won the Editors’ Choice award for “best use of HPC in energy” for their collaborative work with Geophysics Professor Hans-Peter Bunge from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Using SuperMUC-NG’s Lenovo-Intel-based hardware, Bunge’s research group investigates a variety of questions, including modelling convection processes happening in Earth’s mantle, tectonic plate shifts, as well as simulating 3-D global seismic wave propagation in the dynamic Earth models. The team recently created high-resolution 3-D models of the past evolution of Earth’s mantle that assimilate the reconstructed plate motion history, providing better insight and predictive power for energy companies looking to minimize the environmental footprint from subsurface resource extraction.

“We are happy to be supporting cutting-edge research such as Prof. Bunge’s,” said Prof. Dieter Kranzlmüller, current Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing and Director of LRZ. “We are honored that this collaboration resulted in an HPCwire Editors’ Choice award, and are always happy when the HPC community hears about some of the innovations happening at LRZ specifically and the three GCS centres generally.”

-Eric Gedenk