Fermilab Computing Division Wins Award for Excellence
The Fermilab Computing Division was selected as a winner in Government Computing News Agency Awards for Excellence in the application of information technology to improve services delivery. The division was nominated for its ongoing efforts in developing and providing high-performance computing for Fermilab’s physics community. These awards are made to Federal agency organizations with a demonstrated record of excellence. Mike Isely, Donna Lamore, Tom Nash, Don Petravick, Vicky White and Matt Wicks represented the Computing Division staff at the awards banquet in Washington on October 20, 1993. Tom Nash accepted the award on behalf of the division. Also attending were Deputy Director Ken Stanfield, Associate Director Bruce Chrisman and URA President John Toll.
In his nomination, John Peoples cited Fermilab Computing Division’s ongoing pioneering efforts in creating innovative and cost-effective high-performance parallel-computing systems to support the Lab’s mission in HEP. An unusual feature of these developments is their suitability for use in areas of scientific investigation and business computing beyond their primary applications at Fermilab. For hardware, both the farms of RISC workstation processors and the 50 GigaFLOP peak ACPMAPS computer were identified. The software tools that support these systems were also included in the accomplishments as enabling “scientific users to turn their concepts into production parallel computing with relative ease.” Also recognized were “other tools [that] integrate these systems into the operators’ console of an around-the-clock, seven-day-a-week computer center.” These represent the combined and cooperative efforts and expertise and the many current and former members of the Computing Division.
Government Computing News established this award five years ago. This year marks the first time that it has been given to a national laboratory. This award specifically recognizes a group or unit’s performance, rather than that of an individual, for sustained performance over an extended period. Thus it is especially fitted for Computing Division’s efforts.
As Tom Nash, head, Computing Division, noted in his letter of congratulations to the members of the division, “This couldn’t be more true in our case… it was apparent that every group and evert individual in the division has contributed in some important way to attaining the goal recognized by this award.”
The selection criteria for making the award were: elimination of information processing deficiencies, support of new or changed program requirements, improvements in economy/efficiency, improvement in services delivery, and innovative application of information technology.
The wide-ranging potential for applications of the technologies throughout the arena of computationally large problems suggests the tremendous impact they hold. For example, climate, weather, seismic, epidemiological and sociological modeling, DNA analysis and design of materials all have very similar computations features and requirements to the grid-oriented QCD or Monte Carlo calculations done by the theorists on ACPMAPS using Canopy. More loosely-coupled parallel applications, such as inventory, large databases like those the IRS and security agencies handle, resource optimization and management such as product distribution and airline ticketing and crew scheduling, could be quite at home on farms. The adaptability of the Fermilab technologies is very attractive to computer users outside the field of HEP.
Government Computing News has a circulation of approximately 80,000, most of whom are federal, state and local government users of computing or telecommunications technology. Its purpose is to bring the capabilities of technology to its readers as it evolves.