In the category of Lower Price performance, a team led by Tsuyoshi Hamada of Nagasaki University conducted simulations used to study the evolution of star clusters with unprecedented efficiency. Team members included Rio Yokota of the University of Bristol; Keigo Nitadori of RIKEN, the natural sciences research institute in Japan; Tetsu Narumi of the University of Electro-Communications; Kenji Yasuka of Keio University; Makoto Taiji, also of RIKEN; and Kyoshi Oguri of Nagasaki University (http://scyourway.cupercomputing.org/conference/view/gb107).

       Two awards were presented in the Special Category. In the first award, David E. Shaw of D.E. Shaw Research headed a 22-person effort using Anton, a special-purpose supercomputer designed for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of bimolecular systems. The group (http://scyourway.supercomputing.org/conference/view/gb116) was able to examine the motion of Individual atoms by dramatically increasing the speed of MD calculations to about two orders of magnitude beyond the previous state of the art.

       The second award in the Special Category went to a team from IBM Almaden Research Center and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LLNL). It was recognized for building a massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, that incorporates a number of innovations in computation, memory, and communication. Using C2 on LLNL's Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer, the researchers created two cortical simulations at unprecedented scale. The team, led by Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan of IBM, included Steven K. Esser and Dharmendra S. Modha, also of IBM, and Horst D. Simon of Lawrence Berkeley (http://scyourway.supercomputing.org/conference/view/gb/108).

       In the Peak Performance category, Markus Eisenbach of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and his team presented a highly scalable method for calculating the thermodynamics of nanoscale systems. these systems were targeted to the of nanomagnetic systems used in magnetic storage technologies such as disk drive storage, magnetic random access memory, and magnetic cellular logic. The team included Chenggang Zhou of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.; Donald M. Nicholson of Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Gregory Brown of Florida State University; Jeff Larkin of Cray Inc.; and Thomas C. Schulthess of ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Zurich (http://scyourway.supercomputing.org/conference/view/gb109).