Berkeley Lab-led Collaborations Honored for HPC Innovation Excellence

Two Berkeley Lab-led projects—Celeste and Galactos—were honored with Hyperion Research’s 2017 HPC Innovation Excellence Award for "the outstanding application of HPC for business and scientific achievements." According to Hyperion, the awards are designed to showcase return on investment and success stories involving HPC; to help other users better understand the benefits of adopting HPC; and to help justify HPC investments, including for small and medium-size enterprises.

Celeste: A New Model for Cataloging the Universe. This research collaboration of astrophysicists, statisticians and computer scientists from UC Berkeley, Berkeley Lab, MIT, Julia Computing and NERSC developed Celeste, a statistical analysis model designed to dramatically speed up one of modern astronomy’s most time-tested tools: Sky surveys. The goal of the project is to create highly scalable inference methods for extracting a unified catalog of objects in the visible universe from all available astronomy data.

The Hyperion award was presented to the Celeste team during ISC 2017: Jeff Regier, Kiran Pamnany, Keno Fischer, Andreas Noack, Max Lam, Jarrett Revels, Steve Howard, Ryan Giordano, David Paul, David Schlegel, Jon McAuliffe, Alan Edelman, Viral Shah, Rollin Thomas and Prabhat.

Galactos Project Solves One of Cosmology’s Hardest Challenges. Cosmologists and astronomers have wanted to perform the 3-point computation for a long time but could not do so because they did not have access to scalable methods and highly optimized calculations that they could apply to datasets. In 2017, the Galactos project—which teams researchers from Harvard University with the Big Data Center collaboration involving NERSC, Berkeley Lab and Intel—made a major breakthrough in successfully running the 3-point correlation calculation on the Outer Rim, the largest known simulated galaxy dataset that contains information for two billion galaxies.

The Hyperion award was presented to the Galactos team during SC17: Brian Friesen, Mostofa Patwary, Brian Austin, Nadathur Satish, Zachary Slepian, Narayanan Sundaram, Debbie Bard, Daniel Eisenstein, Jack Deslippe, Pradeep Dubey and Prabhat.