Tiankai Tu, Computer Science Department Ph.D. student, and David O'Hallaron, Associate Professor, Computer Science Department and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, led a team of researchers to win the HPC Analytics Challenge at ACM/IEEE Supercomputing 2006 in Tampa, FL.

The winning entry is titled Remote Runtime Steering of Integrated Terascale Simulation and Visualization. The team developed a novel analytic capability that enables scientists and engineers to obtain insights from on-going large-scale parallel unstructured finite element mesh simulations. During the Analytics Challenge session, the team showed a live demo: steering, in real-time, the visualization of a 2050-processor earthquake ground motion simulation running on the Cray XT3 supercomputer in Pittsburgh, PA, via a wireless Internet connection, from a laptop computer in the conference room in Tampa, FL.

The Carnegie Mellon team members were Tiankai Tu (team lead), Jacobo Bielak, Julio Lopez, David O'Hallaron, Leonardo Ramirez-Guzman, and Ricardo Taborda-Rios. The other team members were: Hongfeng Yu (technical lead) and Kwan-Liu Ma of University of California, Davis; Omar Ghattas of the University of Texas at Austin; and Nathan Stone and John Urbanic of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.