Both the UK and South America were ably represented at the recent ISC’14 Student Cluster Competition held in Leipzig, Germany. For some reason, I want to Google up Scottish-Brazilian fusion restaurants to see if such trendy cuisine actually exists, but I’m afraid of the possible results, so let’s just move on and get an up close and personal look at these two teams… Continue reading
You Never Sausage a Sight: German teams compete at ISC’14
I’m going to refrain from punning on the word “wurst.” You’re welcome.
That said, let’s take a closer look at the teams… Continue reading
ISC’14 Kluster Kombat Konfigurations
Let’s look at what the teams were running at the ISC’14 Student Cluster Competition. This year we had perhaps the widest variety of systems in terms of size, and also an entirely new configuration that we hadn’t seen in any competition to date.
The Mass Green team, with students from MIT, Bentley University, and Northeastern University, broke Team Boston tradition with their quad-socket, core-laden, monster cluster. To maximize CPU core count they went with 16-core AMD Opteron processors. (Full table with all team configurations below.) Continue reading
ISC’14: A Cluster Competition for the Ages
The ISC’14 Student Cluster Competition closed out last week in Leipzig, and damn, what a ride! It was an outstanding competition with story lines straight from Hollywood. If John Hughes were still making movies, he’d be writing the script and shopping it around the big studios right now.
(For those of you who don’t know what a Student Cluster Competition is, here’s a quick primer. For those of you who don’t know who John Hughes is, here’s another quick primer.)
Let’s start at the beginning, with a couple of pre-competition webcasts that set the stage. Continue reading
ISC’14 Honor Roll
Results from the ISC’14 Student Cluster Challenge in Leipzig
Overall Winner: Centre for High Performance Computing, South Africa
Highest LINPACK:
1. The University of Edinburgh EPCC, U.K.: 10.10 TFlop/s Continue reading
ASC14: Hometown Kids Smash College LINPACK Record
“Winner, winner, chicken dinner!” is what I think the students from Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University were screaming when they saw the results from the LINPACK portion of the ASC14 Student Supercomputer Challenge. (Of course, they were doing it in Chinese, so there’s a chance I could be wrong.)
In addition to besting their peers, Team Sun Yat-sen also set a new LINPACK cluster competition world record with their 9,272 GFLOP/s score. This not only gives the Yat-sen-ers bragging rights and a nice trophy, it also scores the team a 10,000 RMB cash award (about $1,600 USD). Not too shabby, eh? Continue reading
ASC14 System Configurations
Meet the ASC14 Teams: Champs, Newbies, Boilermakers, and Spanish Koreans
This is the fourth and final story giving you a look at the sixteen teams that competed at the ASC14 Student Cluster Competition in Guangzhou, China.
Team Korea (Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology) is a second-time competitor at ASC. As you’d expect, the first student I talk to from the team is, of course, Spanish. I was wondering if he was actually with Team Brazil but somehow got lost, but no, he’s an exchange student studying computer science in Korea.
The team faced some early problems in setting up their system, but seem to have them handled and are moving ahead. They had a mid-sized cluster, six nodes, but it’s packed with six GPUs to give it more compute heft.
On the GPUs, Team Korea took a different route. Rather than use NVIDIA Tesla K20s or K40s, which are designed for HPC, they went with six NVIDIA Titan GPUs, which are graphics-centric. It’s not an off-the-wall choice. Titan can actually produce more flops than Tesla, but the Titans have half the memory and suck down more power. (Look for a short guest appearance by NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang in the video.)
Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University is no stranger to cluster competitions. Continue reading
Meet the ASC14 Teams: Singapore, Shanghai, and a Side of Hungarian Goulash
The first team up in our third batch of ASC14 team profiles is Team Shanghai (from Shanghai Jiao Tong University). As usual, I have trouble pronouncing the name of the university, something so common that I’m not going to call it out anymore.
This is the second time Team Shanghai has competed at ASC. In their first outing the team did okay, but wasn’t a big winner. But that same team has traveled to Guangzhou, and they believe that they have a much better chance this year to taste the sweet nectar that comes with victory. (Now that’s a horrible sentence.)
While they have seen some problems in getting started this year, nothing seems to have taken them out of their game. One advantage they might have is the secret hiding place they found in the corner behind their booth. We discuss all of these points and more in the video.
Team Hungary, from the University of Miskolc, is the first Hungarian team to compete in any student cluster competition. In the video, you’ll see that they guys speak great English, but we have a bit of trouble hearing each other, even though I’m standing pretty close to them.
As the guys explain, this whole HPC thing is pretty new to all of them. Continue reading
Meet the ASC14 Teams: LINPACK Jockeys and Brazilians Vie for Crown
Welcome to the second batch of video profiles of the sixteen university teams competing for supercomputing glory at the ASC14 Student Cluster Competition.
China’s NUDT (National University of Defense Technology) is another team that could take home the ASC14 cluster crown and cash. (There’s no real crown, but there is a nice pile of cash waiting for the winning teams – see here for details.)
NUDT has earned a solid reputation in these competitions over the years. They’ve finished second at two ASC events and also at SC11. They’ve also taken home the highest LINPACK award at ISC’12 and SC12. But this year, NUDT is setting their sights higher.
In the video interview, we talk about how the team is focusing much more on the applications this year. We also talk about their cluster, using GPUs, and how they tuned the apps and their system to kick out the HPC jams.
Team Brazil (University of Sao Paulo), is the first team from Brazil, and South America, to compete in a major cluster competition. In the video, we learn about the profound impact that Infiniband has had on the students (“We drank toasts!”) and their system configuration. Continue reading