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HPC Wire, the publication for high performance computing, honored the Rocks team at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) with two Reader's Choice Awards and an Editor's Choice Award for software innovation. The second annual polling of the HPCwire's global readership produced the winners of The Reader's Choice Awards and the world class collection of contributing editors to HPC Wire selected the winners for The Editor's Choice Awards.

"We're thrilled to be recognized by both the readers and the editors of HPCwire," said Philip Papadopoulos, director of grid and cluster computing at SDSC. "This award honors several years of development that includes a world-wide group of collaborators and contributors. It also attests to the importance we've put on working closely with scientific applications and research communities to make Rocks flexible, extensible and robust. The core group started four years ago with notion of make clusters easy. We will continue our development with this central theme intact."

Rocks is a user-friendly software package that gives the user of a cluster computer the ability to quickly and easily build the system software suite, install new software on the processors, and manage the system configuration. It provides a Linux cluster environment that enables users to start, monitor, and control processes on cluster nodes from the cluster's front-end computer while supporting standard Linux interfaces and tools. Rocks researchers and their collaborators recently released version 3.3.0 of the Rocks Clustering Distribution (www.rocksclusters.org). Rocks supports all commodity processors: x86, Opteron, Itanium, and now EM64T Xeon.

"Our readership is a very discerning group on the cutting edge of high-performance computing," said Tom Tabor, publisher of HPCwire. "For this reason, the recipients of these awards, including the Rocks group, represent an elite cadre always on the forefront of the very latest and best technology."

The awards were presented by Tabor, at the Supercomputing 2004 Conference and Exhibition in Pittsburgh to members of the Rocks team including Phil Papadopoulos, Mason Katz, Greg Bruno and Federico Sacerdoti.

For a full list of award winners, visit http://www.hpcwire.com.

ABOUT Rocks

Development of Rocks is funded from National Science Foundation, and aided by generous equipment donations from Sun Microsystems, Dell, AMD, Infinicon Systems, and Intel. The Rocks project was started at SDSC in early 2000, with the goal of "making clusters easy". Today, the Rocks user base includes five Top500 computers, and several hundred clusters around the globe. The Rocks Register, a web page where Rocks users voluntarily register their deployed cluster, shows that Rocks powers an aggregate of nearly 70 TFlops of peak computing. More information on Rocks, including documentation and complete access to the source code, can be found on the project's homepage ( www.rocksclusters.org).

Media contact:

Greg Lund,
SDSC Communications,
858-534-8314
greg@sdsc.edu

Ashley Wood,
SDSC Communications,
858-534-8363
awood@sdsc.edu