SC06 Announces HPC Analytics Challenge Finalists

At the SC06 international conference on high performance
computing, networking, data storage and analysis, three teams will
compete in the HPC Analytics Challenge to demonstrate their
capabilities in using advanced data analysis techniques to solve
complex, real-world problems.

Under the theme "Powerful Beyond Imagination," SC06 will be held
November 11-17, 2006, in Tampa, Fla. The HPC Analytics Challenge was
established in 2005 to honor top technical and commercial applications
developed from leading-edge, advanced analytics techniques.

More than ever before, organizations in commercial, government,
university and research sectors are faced with making sense of huge
amounts of data. This challenge has led to the growing field of HPC
analytics, the uses of technologies which allow sophisticated analysis
of phenomena, data and information. In short, the field of analytics
uses integrated computational technologies to support critical
thinking and reasoning, leading to new insights and understanding, in
the context of applied challenges.

"The response to this year's challenge has been fantastic, with
interest from all over the globe, and in eight distinct areas of
technology," said Paul Fussell, Co-chair of the SC06 Analytics
Challenge, and Senior Manager of Mathematical Modeling at Boeing
Phantom Works. "The diversity and quality of the finalist submissions
reflects what we have seen throughout the Challenge: every entry was
noteworthy. Tuesday's final SC06 Analytics Challenge session will be
very enjoyable."

The HPC Analytics Challenge finalists are:

-- "Remote Runtime Steering of Integrated Terascale Simulation
and Visualization," in which a team from Carnegie Mellon
University; the University of California, Davis; the
University of Texas at Austin; and the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center will demonstrate real-time, on-the-fly
monitoring, interpreting and steering, from a remote laptop
computer, of a 1024-processor simulation of the 1994
Northridge earthquake in Southern California.

-- "Computational Oral and Speech Science on E-science
Infrastructures," in which a team from Osaka University, the
National Institute of Information and Communication
Technology, and Osaka University Dental Hospital, all in
Japan, and the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging
Research at the University of California, San Diego, will
demonstrate an E-science infrastructure that enables
scientists and clinicians to achieve the advanced information
produced by simulations. The physical theory of sound
production -- specifically speech sound -- is used to create a
clinical index of disease prognostics for use in medical and
dental clinics.

-- "High-throughput visual analytics for biological sciences:
turning data into knowledge," in which a team from Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory will demonstrate an end-to-end
solution for processing data produced by high-throughput mass
spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics to explore biological
hypotheses. The end result is that a user can go from
experimental spectra to pathway data in a single workflow,
reducing time-to-solution for analyzing biological data from
weeks to minutes.

The three teams, selected as finalists by a panel of nine experts,
will present their work at the Analytics Challenge session at 1:30
p.m. Tuesday, November 14, in room 24-25 of the Tampa Convention
Center. The session will conclude with the announcement of the SC06
Analytics Challenge winner.

More information about the SC2006 conference, which is sponsored
by IEEE and ACM, can be found at: http://sc06.supercomputing.org.