Gordin Bell Prize Winners

0018-9162/98/$10.00 © 1998 IEEE 86 Computer T he Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which forbids the testing of nuclear weapons, is responsible for the dramatic performance gains reported in this year’s Gordon Bell Prize competition. The connection between the treaty and the Bell Prize is simple to understand: One way to maintain confidence in the nuclear stockpile needed for national security is to use computation to tell you what you would have learned from testing. The recognition that such computations far exceeded the capability of existing computers led US Department of Energy officials to initiate the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) program in high-performance computing. The first result of this program, the ASCI-Red machine (briefly described in the sidebar, “ASCI-Red: Big Iron that Really Shines”), was delivered to Sandia National Laboratories in 1997. Four of this year’s entrants reported results on this machine. This year we also saw a dramatic improvement in price/performance, even though the latest machines were not used. Instead, the entrants found a way to squeeze more performance out of each node of their workstation farm and reduce the communications overhead among nodes. One entry reported speedup results, a category that is no longer recognized. Nevertheless, this entry received full consideration. The winners were announced at Supercomputing ’97 in San Jose, California. Details can be found in the conference proceedings.1