Awards Received by PSC Users

PSC is very proud of the wide recognition its users have received as a result of their research here.

HPC Reader's Choice Award

  • In 2007, HPCwire, a leading electronic news outlet for high-performance computing and communication, awarded two of its 2007 Reader's Choice Awards for innovation to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center: * The National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing (NRBSC), PSC's biomedical research program, won for "Most Innovative Use of HPC in the Life Sciences," and * ZEST, a PSC-developed file system that facilitates scientific computing on very large-scale (petascale) systems, won for "Most Innovative HPC Storage Technology or Product."

HPC Analytics Challenge Award

  • In 2006, a team of scientists and engineers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Texas, the University of California, Davis, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) won the Analytics Challenge Award at SC06. The award was presented on Nov. 16 in Tampa, site of SC06 - the international conference of high-performance computing, networking, data storage and analysis - after a presentation by team leader Tiankai Tu of Carnegie Mellon.
  • In 2005, SPICE (Simulated Pore Interactive Computing Environment), a project led by Peter Coveney, University of London, with PSC's Sergiu Sanielevici as a co-author, won the HPC Analytics Challenge award, a first-time SC award given for innovative techniques in rigorous data analysis, advanced networks and high-end visualization to solve a complex, real-world problem.

CLADE Award

  • In 2006, a paper that describes a system for aggregating processors on demand from across the distributed resources of the National Science Foundation TeraGrid has won the best paper award for the 2006 CLADE (Challenges of Large Applications in Distributed Environments) workshop held June 19 in Paris, France.

    The paper, "Creating Personal Adaptive Clusters for Managing Scientific Jobs in a Distributed Computing Environment," co-authored by Jeff Gardner of Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), Vladimir Litvin of the California Institute of Technology, and Evan Turner, of TACC, describes a virtual environment built on top of an existing middleware tool called GridShell. The combination, including the pre-existing middleware, will be renamed MyCluster. It is already in production use on the TeraGrid, where it has handled about 100,000 jobs and 900 teraflops of scientific computation.

Gordon Bell Prize
  • In 2003, a group lead by Jacobo Bielak, Omar Ghattas, and David O'Hallaron of CMU and George Biros of the University of Pennsylvania won the Gordon Bell prize for High Performance Computing for developing earthquake simulations on the TCS that play an important role in reducing seismic risk. Other group members include Volkan Akcelik, Ioannis Epanomeritakis, Antonio Fernandez, Eui Joong Kim, Julio Lopez, and Tiankai Tu of Carnegie Mellon, and Greg Foss and John Urbanic of PSC.

  • In 2002, a Gordon Bell award for special accomplishment went to researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for work on NAMD, software that maps the structure of large biological molecules and molecular systems. Using Lemieux, NAMD scaled effectively and efficiently to over 2,000 processors. The authors were James C. Phillips, Gengbin Zheng, Sameer Kumar, and Laxmikant V. Kale.
    • See the NAMD web site.


  • In 1998, Yang Wang of the PSC collaborated with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Energy Research Supercomputing Center and the University of Bristol, UK, to win the Gordon Bell prize for best acheivement in high-performance computing. Their first-principles simulation of complex magnetic properties is the world's first fully fledged scientific application to sustain more than one Teraflop. This was accomplished on a 1480-processor T3E-1200 system at Cray Research.

Discover magazine's Awards for Technological Innovation

The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards

The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards were founded in 1989 to "honor the creativity and inspiration of those who use information technology to improve our lives." CWSA awards have recognized research at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center eleven times since 1992.

    In 2003, PSC was one of five finalists for the Computerworld Honors 21st Century Achievement Award. PSC was honored for "using information technology to make great strides toward remarkable social achievement in Science," according to Daniel Morrow, Executive Director of the Computerworld Honors Program.

    In 1999, Peter Kollman and Yong Duan of the University of California, San Francisco, were finalists in the CWSA in Science for their simulation of the folding action of a protein. Their 1 microsecond simulation, 100 times longer than any before, offers new insights into the folding process and could lead to more effective drugs for diseases believed to be caused by malfunctions in protein folding.



    In 1997, Kelvin Drogemeier and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center won the CWSA in Science for Drogemeier's research in storm forecasting.

    In 1996, The Center for Light Microscope Imaging and Biotechnology, a National Science Foundation science and technology center based at Carnegie Mellon University, won the CWSA in Science for developing automated light microscope technology to observe the dynamics of living cells.

    Also in 1996, three of the other four finalists in the Science category of the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards were also collaborations with PSC.

      At Carnegie Mellon University, Ted Russell and colleague Greg McRae, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used PSC's Cray C90 to demonstrate that smog reduction strategies can be improved through selective control of nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons, produced from automobile emissions and many other manmade sources.

      At the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Gary Glatzmaier used PSC's CRAY C90 to produce the first three-dimensional computer simulation of how the Earth's magnetic field is generated and how it occasionally reverses its direction. The work required 5,000 hours of computing time to simulate 80,000 years of geodynamic history, providing insights into the nature of the Earth's magnetic field.

      Scientists at California Institute of Technology's Scalable Concurrent Programming Laboratory, used PSC's CRAY T3D to simulate the aerodynamics of the Delta II satellite launch vehicle. The simulations lower the cost of space operations by providing a means of identifying flaws that cannot be traced through existing test procedures.


    In 1995, Mordecai-Mark Mac Low of the University of Chicago was a finalist in the CWSA in Science for his simulations of the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter.

    In 1994, the CWSA for Breakthrough Computational Science was awarded to researchers Charles Peskin and David McQueen of the New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences for development of a three-dimensional computational model of blood flow in the heart, its nearby valves and major vessels.

    In 1993, the PSC itself was the recipient of the CWSA in Science for its efforts to bring high-performance computing to bear on research that improves the quality of human life. The award cited the center's involvment in important biomedical research on interactions between proteins and DNA.

    In 1992, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation received the CWSA award in Science for the creation and operation of supercomputing centers at local universities, including the operation of PSC.

The Sidney Fernbach Award

The Sidney Fernbach Award was established in 1992 to honor the memory of one of the pioneers in the development and application of high-performance computers for the solution of large computational problems. It is given annually by the IEEE Computer Society to recognize "outstanding contribution in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches."

Forefronts of Large-Scale Computation Awards

Computers and Thought Award

    In 1991, Hiroaki Kitano received the most prestigious award in artificial intelligence for researchers under 35, the Computers and Thought Award, for his work in simultaneous language translation programs.