ISC2006, the leading supercomputing event in Europe, is the premier venue for gaining an international perspective in the field of HPC. Combining a strong line-up of technical experts with exhibits from leading supercomputing centres, as well as hardware and software vendors, ISC presents state-of-the-art applications, architectures and trends in supercomputing. For the first time, the conference will be held in the city of Dresden. The conference programme is conducted in English.

"As ISC begins its third decade as Europe's leading HPC conference, we are very pleased to also announce the third year of the ISC Award, which adds another dimension to the conference programme", stated Conference Chairman Prof. Hans Werner Meuer of the University of Mannheim. "The goal of the ISC Award is to honour scientists working on projects which address the applicability of high performance computing to real life-problems in an innovative way. As Dresden is an emerging centre of biotechnology, one area where we are seeking submissions is the field of bioscience."

The ISC Award was established at ISC2004 to promote and reward innovative supercomputing researchers who have distinguished themselves through state-of-the-art projects. For 2006, the ISC Award focuses specifically on two areas:

• Life sciences: of interest are projects in the area of bioscience and computational medicine with examples of where high performance computing systems helped to gain completely new insight and understanding, rather than modelling a well-known phenomenon with higher resolution.
• Application scalability on very large systems: of interest are projects addressing the typical hybrid nature of large systems where a shared memory architecture at the node level becomes the building block for very large clusters. Innovative solutions should scale very well across a variation of both paradigms and demonstrate high efficiency for very large numbers of nodes.

Authors of the winning papers will be invited to visit research labs of HP and Intel. Authors of the winning papers will also receive round-trip transportation (economy class) to the ISC2006 conference in Dresden and complimentary registration for the conference and the related social events.

Contributions in English are solicited. Extended abstracts of not less than four pages should be submitted in electronic form to the Chairman of the Award Committee, Michael Resch, HLRS, Germany,at resch@hlrs.de by Monday, February 20, 2006. Formats can be either Acrobat .pdf or Word .doc.

Abstracts should clearly describe the contents of the contribution. The relevance and originality of the contribution must be stated and important references included. The preferred topic area has to be indicated. All contributions will be refereed. Winning contributions presented at the conference will be published in the conference proceedings. The Award Committee will choose one contribution for each topic for an award. Award Committee members are Frank Baetke, HP U.S.A.; Arndt Bode, Technical University, Munich, Germany; Herbert Cornelius, Intel Germany; Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, USA; Pierre Leca, Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), France; Thomas Ludwig, University of Heidelberg, Germany; Ron Perrott, University of Belfast, UK; Michael Resch, High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart, Germany (chairman); Satoshi Sekiguchi, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan; and Horst Simon, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), USA.

The annual conference will be held in Dresden, which celebrates its 800th anniversary in 2006. Designated as one of Germany's "Cities of Science", Dresden has a long history of technical innovation and is home to a growing number of high technology industries and research institutions. For more information about the conference, go to http://www.supercomp.de/