News & Announcements

November 17, 2011

"Former Argonne Intern Wins SC11 Best Student Paper Award"

Former Argonne intern Wesley Kendall has been named winner of the SC11 conference’s Best Student Paper Award. With an acceptance rate of 21 percent, SC11 is one of the most competitive technical conferences in high-performance computing. The winning paper, titled "Simplified Parallel Domain Traversal," was written jointly with Jingyuan Wang, Melissa Allen, Tom Peterka, Jian Huang, and David Erickson.

Coauthor Tom Peterka, an assistant computer scientist in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) Division, has worked with Kendall for several years. Their association began through the DOE SciDAC-2 Institute for Ultrascale Visualization; subsequently, during the summers of 2008 and 2009, Kendall joined the MCS Division as an Argonne intern. The two have continued their close collaboration, coauthoring ten papers, and Peterka is currently a member of Kendall’s dissertation committee at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 

The award-winning paper by Kendall et al. presents DStep, a flexible system that provides a new capability for data-intensive scientific analysis tasks. Many scientific applications require domain traversal – the exchange of information outside the immediate source region or during ensemble runs. Parallelization of domain traversal techniques  across distributed-memory architectures is challenging, particularly when the traversal is data dependent. To address this issue, the authors introduce a two-tiered communication strategy that overlaps communication and computation at large scale. Using DStep to process terascale atmospheric CO2 and climate data, the researchers were able to obtain excellent scalability on up to 65,536 IBM Blue Gene/P cores at Argonne’s Advanced Leadership Computing Facility.