While raw supercomputing performance may be not be advancing as quickly as it has in the past, researchers putting the most powerful systems to work continue to discover new ways to make them more powerful and versatile, judging from this year’s finalists for the Association for Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Prize.

This is “a period of exploration in computer architecture, where we’re seeing people people using heterogenous computing, new types of memory hierarchies, and different types of programming models to make computers productive and efficient,” said Jeffrey Vetter, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who was a member of this year’s awards committee and is a former recipient of the Gordon Bell prize.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here