News From the Conference
NASA Private Cloud Wins HPCwire Award at SC16
11.15.16
A private cloud supporting NASA Earth scientists has won a 2016 HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award at the international SC16 conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The award for Best Data-Intensive System (End-User Focused) went to ADAPT—the Advanced Data Analytics Platform at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), based at Goddard Space Flight Center. Supplementing substantial NCCS simulation capabilities, ADAPT combines high-performance computing and virtualization technologies to create an on-site private cloud specifically designed for large-scale data analysis.
Accepting the award in the NASA exhibit at the Salt Palace Convention Center were Daniel Duffy, Garrison Vaughan, Ben Bledsoe, Phil Webster, Bruce Pfaff, Fred Reitz, Carrie Spear, and Jordan Caraballo-Vega of the NCCS. Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications, Inc. and publisher of HPCwire, presented the award.
ADAPT provides a customizable high-performance cloud to meet the widely varying requirements of the NASA science community. “In support of data analytics, ADAPT’s design has created an agile environment with a very low barrier to entry for scientists to pose critical questions whose answers rely on access to very large datasets,” said Duffy.
NASA ADAPT customers include the Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), whose researchers have mounted a multi-year field campaign to better understand how vulnerable or resilient arctic ecosystems and societies are to environmental change. The NCCS has also engineered the ability to burst from ADAPT into commercial clouds for projects needing even more resources or those projects that must be done within a certain time frame. This capability is successfully being used to estimate vegetation and carbon uptake across the Sub-Sahara and received a 2015 HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award for the Best Collaboration Between Government and Industry.
Each year, HPCwire runs an awards program to recognize the best and the brightest developments in high-performance computing (HPC) over the preceding 12 months. The global HPC community nominates and votes on the awards. The full award citation is available on the HPCwire website.
