GE Global Research and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory are among the 2013 winners of International Data Corporation’s HPC Innovation Excellence Awards, announced Tuesday in Denver at the SC13 supercomputing conference. The awards recognize noteworthy achievements by users of high performance computing (HPC) technologies.

Both institutions use HPC resources at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility to conduct their award-winning research. The annual awards, now in their sixth year, showcase return on investment and scientific innovation success stories involving HPC. The winning ALCF projects are described below:

GE Global Research (Lead: Umesh Paliath): GE Global Research's work on large eddy simulations (LES) leveraged petascale computing to break barriers in accurately characterizing the key flow physics of multi-scale turbulent mixing in boundary layer and shear flows. Findings from this research will significantly improve the prediction and design capabilities for next-generation aircraft engines and wind turbines, both from demonstrating the viability of LES as a characterization tool and as a source of physics guidance. For more information, view the project summary for Enabling Green Energy and Propulsion Systems via Direct Noise Computation.

Princeton University/Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (Leads: William Tang, Bei Wang, and Stephane Ethier): Using high-end supercomputing resources, advanced simulations of confinement physics for large-scale MFE plasmas have been carried out for the first time with very high phase-space resolution and long temporal duration to deliver important new scientific insights. This research was enabled by the new GTC-P code, developed to use multi-petascale capabilities on world-class systems such as the IBM BG-Q "Mira" at the ALCF and "Sequoia" at LLNL. For more information, view the project summary for Kinetic Simulations of Fusion Energy Dynamics at the Extreme Scale.

Both projects have been awarded computing time at the ALCF in 2013 through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.