An industry trade publication has bestowed two awards upon the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) due to the Oakland-based organization's efforts relating to clean energy and the application of new technology to address industrial problems.
During the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis in Denver on Monday, HPCwire awarded PSC with a "Readers' Choice: Best Use of HPC Energy" award and an "Editors' Choice: Best HPC in Industry (Automotive, Aerospace, Manufacturing, Chemical, etc.)" award.
It marks the 14th year that the PSC has been recognized at the annual event, which has run for two decades.
PSC earned the "Readers' Choice" award for efforts performed by its flagship Bridges-2 supercomputer, which ran simulations to reveal how a coal-like material can be converted into a graphitic form. The PSC said this could prove vital for clean energy and other advanced application efforts, like for the making of lithium-ion batteries. The PSC worked with Ohio University, the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford to perform these efforts.
As for the "Editors' Choice" award, PSC was celebrated for its research on the Rayleigh–Bénard convection problem, which involves the monitoring of the behavior of fluid that is moving between a heated plate and a cooled plate.
The PSC, in partnership with the National Energy Technology Laboratory and Cerebras Systems, obtained a fluid flow solution using Cerebras’s Wafer-Scale Engine technology in PSC’s Neocortex supercomputer, a feat that could result in "substantial" speed and energy efficiency and, through the use of simulations, be used to predict severe weather events like downbursts, microbursts and derechos or even the movement of magma movement in the earth’s core.
"PSC has been supporting innovative and cutting-edge research for years,” Barr von Oehsen, director of PSC, said in a statement. “We do this through our research computing and data systems, but also through the knowledge and expertise the PSC team brings to every research project, ensuring outstanding research is being achieved.”
