This SC18 has been sort of a ‘perfect storm’ in terms of my coverage – in the negative sense of the term. I had a more than full schedule of work associated with my analyst career, vendor briefings, meetings, events, all in addition to my usual student cluster coverage. I was counting on the fact that I’d have the same 24 hour all access SC18 badge that I’ve received for the prior eight years, which would allow me to do team interviews and videos during non-show hours. But no pass for me, unfortunately. So I didn’t have enough time fulfill all of my obligations and my student cluster competition coverage suffered greatly as a consequence.
But I do have some detailed results to share and share them I will.
There was some big news at the SC18 competition – Team Nanyang Technological University set a new LINPACK record with 51.51 TFlop/s, which is significantly higher than the previous record of 51.77 TFlop/s set at SC17.
If I know Team Nanyang, they’re sporting a small cluster (node wise) that has a heap of GPUs, probably 16 NVIDIA V100s, knowing them and their past configurations. Our German pals at FAU took down second place, probably with a dual-node system of their own, packed with 12-16 NVIDIA V100s as well. They’ve always had a good touch with LINPACK, having won the Highest LINPACK award in the past.
Tsinghua usually doesn’t show up on the leaderboard for LINPACK, they’re much more likely to grab top marks for HPCG (which they did this year). We also want to call out Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) for scoring well above average on this benchmark.
The race for the top HPCG spot was very close this year. Tsinghua, Nanyang, and FAU turned in scores that were only separated by a handful of points. Tsinghua managed to beat the others by an eyelash to get the win. They still hold the HPCG Student Cluster Competition record with their score of 2080.6 from the ASC’18 competition.
Just as Tsinghua’s HPCG was slightly down this year , the average HPCG score was marginally down as well. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but we’ll see if this is just an anomaly or a true trend as we see the results from other competitions in future years.
Next up we’ll look at the application results
, stay tuned!
Posted In: Latest News, SC 2018 Dallas