NCAR Nominated for three HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards

HPCwire, the online magazine for the high-performance computing community, has announced the nominations for this year’s Readers’ Choice Awards, and NCAR has been recognized for activities in three categories. All HPCwire subscribers are eligible to vote, and voting closes on October 1. NCAR staff cannot vote for NCAR nominations, but you can encourage your non-NCAR colleagues to vote!

In the category “Best HPC Response to Societal Plight,” CGD’s Xingying Huang collaborated on the following nomination for the ARkStorm 2.0 dataset: 

National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers developed ARkStorm 2.0, a simulations-based dataset on ‘plausible worst-case scenario’ flooding in California. The dataset is made available through Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)’s Corral storage system. FEMA and other agencies have expressed interest in using the dataset to game out disaster scenarios from an infrastructure and risk assessment perspective.

In the category, “Best Use of High Performance Data Analytics & Artificial Intelligence:” Amy DeCastro and colleagues in RAL used Cheyenne in their efforts to improve wildfire forecasts. CISL’s Scott Pearse won Best Visualization at PEARC23 for his visualization of this work:

National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientists developed a machine learning model to update fuel maps quickly and accurately, providing significant improvements to wildfire forecasts that could aid in evacuation and fire rescue efforts.

And in the category, “Best HPC Collaboration (Academia/Government/Industry),” NCAR is part of the ACCESS Allocations Service collaboration working to democratize access to advanced cyberinfrastructure resources:

The ACCESS Allocations Service (funded by the NSF), working with Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), provides an HPC allocations marketplace accessible to researchers no matter the size of the institution or the scale of the planned work.