CMU Earthquake Modeling Research Wins Gordon Bell Award
November 20, 2003
An earthquake modeling project designed by Carnegie Mellon researchers won the "Oscar" of supercomputingthe 2003 Gordon Bell Award. The honor, granted in the category for special accomplishment based on innovation, was presented by the U.S. Department of Energys Fred Johnson during the 15th annual supercomputing conference, SC2003, in Phoenix, Arizona.
High Resolution Forward and Inverse Earthquake Modeling on Terascale Computers develops earthquake simulation algorithms and tools and conducts 1 Hz simulations of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in the Los Angeles Basin using 100 million grid points. ECE team members were graduate student Julio Lopez and his advisor David O'Hallaron, Associate Professor of CS and ECE. Other Carnegie Mellon contributors included: Volkan Akcelik, Jacobo Bielak, Ioannis Epanomeritakis, Antonio Fernandez, Omar Ghattas, Eui Joong Kim, and Tiankai Tu. George Biros from the University of Pennsylvania and John Urbanic of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center also co-authored the study.
The $5,000 prize, donated by Gordon Bell, recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of high performance computing. According to the SC2003 web site, The goal of the awards are to stimulate future advances of parallel computing applications by identifying major accomplishments and tracking progress over time. A pioneer in computer architecture, parallel processing and high performance computing, Gordon Bell was a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon from 1966-1972.
SC2003 highlighted innovative developments in high-performance computing and networking and was sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture.
