November 30, 1999

Leonid "Lenny" Oliker, a post-doctoral fellow in NERSC's Scientific Computing Group, was co-recipient of the "Best Paper of SC99" award at SC99, the annual conference on high-performance computing and networking.

Oliker and Rupak Biswas co-authored "Parallelization of a Dynamic Unstructured Application Using Three Leading Paradigms." They implemented a mesh adaptation code on the Cray T3E, SGI Origin2000 and the Tera MTA supercomputers comparing programmability and performance. They compared several critical factors of parallel code development, including runtime, scalability, programmability, and memory overhead. Their overall results demonstrate that multithreaded systems offer tremendous potential for quickly and efficiently solving some of the most challenging real-life problems on parallel computers.

"I'm very excited to receive this award and grateful for the opportunities I've had at NERSC," Oliker said after the award was announced on Thursday, Nov. 18. SC99 was held from Nov. 13-19 in Portland, Ore.

Co-author Rupak Biswas is an employee of MRJ Technology Solutions and works in the Numerical Aerospace Simulation Division at NASA's Ames Research Center in Redwood City.

NERSC is in the second year of helping assess the performance of the only multithreaded architecture computer, built by Tera Computer. The machine is installed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Oliker's paper can be found on the web at: http://www.nersc.gov/~oliker/paperlinks.html