Berkeley Lab Researchers Win Best Paper Award at ICCS

Five Berkeley Lab researchers were recently honored with a Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS), held in Faro, Portugal, June 12-14. ICCS is an annual conference that brings together researchers and scientists from mathematics and computer science; researchers from various application areas who are pioneering computational methods in sciences such as physics, chemistry, life sciences, and engineering; and researchers from the arts and humanitarian fields.

Pablo Enfedaque, Stefano Marchesini, and Huibin Chang of Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division and Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications (CAMERA); Bjoern Enders of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center; and David Shapiro of the Advanced Light Source received the award for their paper, “High Performance Partial Coherent X-ray Ptychography.”

The paper provided an overview of the growing adoption of ptychographic imaging in several scientific disciplines and presented a unique solution for improving partial coherence X-ray ptychography in a high performance computing setting. The research team demonstrated that their algorithm can speed up data acquisition at the beamline by an order of magnitude while increasing the robustness of the reconstruction to non-stable measurements. The proposed implementation “exploits an efficient data layout and multi-GPU parallelism to achieve massive acceleration and efficient scaling,” according to the paper’s abstract. This is critical for handling the increase in computational requirements of the partial coherence analysis, the researchers noted.

“As always, submission to ICCS was very competitive this year, with nearly 600 papers submitted and an overall acceptance rate of only 25-30 percent," said Enfedaque, lead author who presented the paper at the meeting.