XJTLU researcher nominated for Gordon Bell Prize

The “Nobel Prize” in international high-performance computing applications, the Gordon Bell Prize, recently released the finalists for this year.

The annual prize is awarded for outstanding achievement and innovation in high-performance computing.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which presents the award, selected six finalists this year, and Dr Yan Yan from the School of Advanced Technology at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China, is part of a global team that has made it onto this prestigious list.

Dr Yan says: “I was fortunate to work with such talented individuals aiming to speed up the software that simulates jet engines and advances aviation research. I am honoured that our team has been selected as finalists.”

According to Dr Yan, the team’s research focuses on how to use supercomputers to analyse the complicated airflow inside a jet engine. It has many important applications, particularly in optimising the design and performance of simulation software for the aerospace industry.

The team developed a new large eddy simulation code, demonstrating that it can be used to solve complicated flow-related problems in jet engines. The code was engineered on Wuxi’s National Supercomputing Center’s supercomputer, Sunway, allowing the researchers to optimise the design of jet engines, improve their efficiency and stability, and meet higher safety and stability standards.

The winner of the Gordon Bell Prize will be announced in November in Denver at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis.

The research team will publish their article, “Towards Exascale Computation for Turbomachinery Flows”, in the conference proceedings. Her co-authors are from Zhejiang University, Tsinghua University, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi and Taiyuan University of Technology, from China; the University of Cambridge, UK; and the University of Florida and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from the US.

The other five Gordon Bell Prize finalists are teams led by the University of Michigan, Pennsylvania State University, Royal Institute of Technology Sweden, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology Saudi Arabia, and Harvard University, respectively.

“All the teams use state-of-the-art supercomputers to carry out their research and produce remarkable results in fields such as materials science, fluid dynamics, nuclear simulation, seismic processing, and biomolecular simulation studies,” says Dr Yan.

“It is a really exciting time,” she says. “I look forward to working on valuable research to solve engineering and scientific problems we currently face.”

By Huatian Jin

Edited by Catherine Diamond