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World Cup is Lame Compared to This Competition- Where are the Apps?

June 18, 2018 · Dan Olds

So you think World Cup soccer is a big deal? While I’m sure it’s very compelling to watch a bunch of athletes kick a ball around, World Cup misses the boat because it doesn’t include teams putting together their own supercomputers and then racing them against other teams. What a pity.

There is only one event this summer that has all the excitement of World Cup and includes supercomputer construction, optimization, and competitive benchmarking. That event is the ISC18 Student Cluster Competition, kicking off in Frankfurt on June 25th.

The university teams competing at ISC18 have their work cut out for them. They’ll have to be at the peak of their game to handle what the organizers are throwing at them this year. Let’s take a gander at what they’ll be doing.

Monday

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, the first day of the competition, is Benchmark Day. First up, they’ll be running the HPC Challenge (HPCC) benchmark. This is a combination of several benchmarks (STREAM, HPL, PTRANS, FFT and others) that are designed to test every aspect of a supercomputer.

Next on their Benchmark Day menu is a heaping helping of LINPACK (HPL). They’re be running LINPACK in order to qualify for, and hopefully win, the Highest LINPACK trophy. For dessert, each team will try to get the highest HPCG (HP Conjugant Gradient) score. HPCG is a grueling benchmark that will test their machines to the limit. While there isn’t a separate award for highest HPCG, it’s one of the scores I track over all the competitions and publish world records for. Team scores for HPCG and HPCC will account for 10% each when it comes to overall champion points.

Day two, Tuesday, is when the supercomputing Padawans get to try their luck on real scientific applications. Here’s what they’re facing:

Grid: a C++ library that is designed to exploit parallelism at all levels, including SIMD (vector instructions), OpenMP (shared memory parallelism), and MPI (distributed memory through message passing). Students will be judged on their time to solution results based on a problem set that will be provided by competition organizers. Grid results will account for 15% of the team’s overall score.

Nektar++: is an application I’ve never heard of before. According to organizers, it’s a spectral/hp element framework designed to support the construction of efficient high-performance scalable solvers for a wide range of partial differential equations. It has been used for things like studying how fluids flow through a channel with corrugated walls and how air flows over a Formula 1 car body. So if you want to do either of those things, Nektar++ is for you. Student scores on Nektar++ will account for 15% in the overall scoring.

Secret Application: this one is, of course, a secret. However, I’m guessing it will be Mine Sweeper, with students judged on how quickly their machine can solve the game when it’s set to “Uber Hard.” Like Grid and Nektar++, the secret application will account for 15% of overall scoring.

AI Application: in this task, students will use TensorFlow to do image recognition model training. Students will be asked to demonstrate maximum accuracy within a fixed training time using ImageNet 2012. More details on how this application will work when I’m on the ground in Frankfurt. This is the most valuable application when it comes to scoring with 25% weight in the total event score.

In addition to the benchmarks and applications , student teams will be interviewed by representatives of the Student Cluster Competition board, an august organization of HPC experts. The interviewers will talk with each team in order to learn how well the teams understand their systems, the applications, and find out what steps they took optimize the benchmarks and applications. The team interview accounts for 10% of their overall score.

In our next article, “Why the ISC18 Student Cluster Competition is Better than World Cup,” we take a look at how the two international competitions stack up…stay tuned.

Fracas in Frankfurt: ISC18 Cluster Competition Teams Unveiled

June 10, 2018 · Dan Olds

The Student Cluster Competition season heats up with the seventh edition of the ISC Student Cluster Competition, slated to begin on June 25th in Frankfurt, Germany. This cluster competition is a different animal than the other two majors (the Asian ASC and US based SC).

(If you’re one of the few people who aren’t rabidly following the tumultuous world of Student Cluster Competitions , here’s an article that will bring you up to speed.)

The ISC competition puts a premium on tuning applications to get maximum performance. At ISC, student typically only run one application at a time and work to optimize it within a set amount of time. They then turn in their results and get started on the next application.

The ISC’18 cluster fest is truly an international affair. Twelve teams of undergraduate students from eight countries will be clustering for pride

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, glory, shiny trophies, and the love of the game.

In the video, we officially unveil the teams and discuss what each team is bringing to the table. I’m joined by long time cluster competition official Pak Lui, and newcomer Ophir Maor from the HPC-AI Advisory Council.

The first part of the video is a short interview with Anna Clarke, ISC’s Brand and Business Development Manager. Anna talks about the STEM activities at this year’s ISC, which are geared towards attracting young people towards careers in HPC – certainly a worthy goal.

We’ll be on the ground at ISC18, covering the cluster competition like a circus tent. In our next article, we’ll take a look at the benchmarks and scientific applications facing this year’s crop of amateur clusterers, then we’ll take a close up look at the individual teams and break down their games. Stay tuned…

ASC’18: Final Results Revealed & Wrapped Up

May 19, 2018 · Dan Olds

It was an exciting week at ASC18 in Nanyang, China. The student teams braved extreme heat, extremely difficult applications

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, and extreme competition in order to cross the cluster competition finish line.

The gala awards ceremony took place on Wednesday. The auditorium was packed with student teams, various dignitaries, the media, and other interested parties. So what happened?

Tsinghua was crowned as the ASC18 Overall Champion for the fourth time. Their win was based on their record-breaking HPCG score along with their runaway victory on the Siesta Mystery Application. Since the ASC committee doesn’t disclose the scores on all of the applications to us , we really don’t know for sure how Tsinghua crafted their win.

This win is more than just another trophy in the Tsinghua University trophy case. First, there’s the financial reward, a cool 100,000 Chinese Yuan (which translates to about $15,700 US). This win also lands them a coveted slot in the ISC18 Student Cluster Competition, which takes place in mid-June at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany.

In a surprise move, first time competitor ShanghaiTech University, grabbed the second place slot, 50,000 Yuan, and also punched their ticket for ISC18 in Germany. Again, we’re not privy to all of the scores at the ASC competitions, so we can only guess why a team finished as they did. While ShanghaiTech won the RELION application, they didn’t finish near the leaders in either of the benchmark tasks. The team must have done pretty well on CFL3D, the AI text recognition app, or in the interview section of the contest.

ShanghaiTech also took home the prestigious e-Prize, an award for achieving extraordinary performance out of their cluster. The ASC hopes to build their e-Prize into a Gordon Bell Prize for college student supercomputing.

Banquet & Wrap Up

The competition wrapped up with a banquet thrown in the students honor at a local hotel. While I’ve seen a lot of things in China and consider myself a somewhat sophisticated traveler, I’ve never seen bigger rotating dining room turntables in my life. It was motorized and built to handle a heavy load. Here are a couple of shots of it.

It was at this dinner when I discovered a new taste treat that was invented by the geniuses at Nanchang University. It’s a fermented juice that comes in a handy pouch. I was particularly partial to the peach and pear flavors. It goes down easy, quenches your thirst, and still has a mild alcohol kick. What more could I want?

As we wrap up the ASC18 competition, I want to thank Inspur for organizing and sponsoring the competition and all of the student volunteers who made it happen. During the course of the competition, I was aided by several translators and want to thank them for taking on the chore of translating my rapid fire, mumbling, stuttering English into flawless Chinese and back into English again.

Next up on the Student Cluster Competition calendar is the ISC18 competition in Frankfurt. We’ll see a host of international teams, plus Tsinghua and ShanghaiTech. As always, we’ll be covering this competition like spray paint on a new mailbox. So stay tuned….

ASC’18: New HPCG Record (Barely) Set!

May 16, 2018 · Dan Olds

When it comes to HPC benchmarks, very few are tougher on the hardware than HPCG. Designed to complement HPL (LINPACK), HPCG much more closely mimics today’s real-world workloads. Together, HPL and HPCG are sort of bookmarks in system performance: HPL will show off the best that the system can do while HPCG yields the worst case scenario.

The ASC18 Student Cluster Competition competitors turned in some very solid results for HPCG. Tsinghua University set a new record for HPCG with their score of 2,080.60 GFlop/s, topping the SC17 record of 2,055.85 set by Nanyang University.

Qinghua University was a very close second, notching a score of 2,068.80. The rest of the field was left in the dust of the two front runners.

In HPCG, Tsinghua’s six nodes and 16 NVIDIA V100s really hit their stride. What Tsinghua couldn’t do on LINPACK, they did in spades on HPCG. Qinghua continued to surprise with their second place finish in both HPCG and LINPACK.

Looking back at HPCG history, we see that both Tsinghua and Qinghua topped the SC17 HPCG record, but by only a small margin.

Diving a little bit deeper

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, the average HPCG at the most recent cluster competition (SC17) was 932.11 GFlop/s while the average score at ASC18 was 1,009.22, a modest increase.

It will be interesting to see if anyone at ISC18 can match or beat the HPCG and LINPACK scores from ASC18. There are only six weeks separating the events and without any big hardware advances , we shouldn’t expect to see significantly higher scores. However, it’s possible that an ISC18 team might bring some liquid cooled gear and, along with a lust for optimizing benchmarks, set new records in one or both.

ASC’18: Tough Applications & Tough Luck

May 15, 2018 · Dan Olds

The applications at the ASC18 Student Cluster Competition were tough. Tougher than the $3.99 steak special at your local greasy spoon restaurant. The apps are so tough that even Chuck Norris backs away from them slowly.

Take a look at the results on the ASC18 Mystery Application, Siesta, a molecular dynamics simulation program.

This turned out to be a very (very!) difficult application for the ASC18 students.

As you can see on the table, Tsinghua ran away from the pack with their score of 10.5. NUDT and Nanchang are quite a distance behind with scores of 4.3 and 4.2 respectively.

Worse yet are the average score for the 20 team field was a shockingly low 1.9 while the median score was 1.53. So the mystery application really took students by surprise this year as witnessed by the results. Ouch.

RELION (Regularized Likelihood Optimization) is a program that helps refine, and replace the missing parts, of a 3D or 2D electron cryo-microscopy image.

Versions of RELION are GPU-enabled, giving the teams a chance to greatly accelerate their computation.

While RELION wasn’t quite as difficult on the teams as Siesta, it still proved to be quite a challenge for the large majority of teams. Check out the low average and even lower median scores and you’ll see what I mean.

Shanghai Technical University (also known as ShanghaiTech) grabbed the win in RELION with a score of 14.58. This is one of those instances that prove that it’s not the hardware that wins at Student Cluster Competitions , but how the team uses their hardware. ShanghaiTech only had 8 V100 GPUs and six nodes.

Hardware wise, there were 9 teams who had more V100s than ShanghaiTech and several teams who had more CPUs as well. In fact, NTHU, Tsinghua and Shanghai Jaio Tong University all had more GPUs than ShanghaiTech. Again, it’s the students and what they do with their hardware that makes the difference in these competitions – not just how much hardware they bring.

NTHU took second place with a great score of 13.14 and the mighty Team Tsinghua was relegated to third place.

In our next

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, and final, ASC18 article, we reveal the winners and wrap up the competition with a look at the awards ceremony, the lavish banquet, and one of Nanchang’s greatest exports. Stay tuned…..

Students Pack Many LINs @ ASC’18

May 14, 2018 · Dan Olds

The first task facing the university teams at the ASC18 Student Cluster Competition was running the venerable LINPACK benchmark.

It was a hard fought battle, but in the end

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, Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) came out on top with a score of 42.99 teraflops.

Newcomer Qinghai University was a surprise second place with a 40.47 mark, with Sun Yat-Sen, a former Highest LINPACK winner taking home third place with a 37.42 score.

NTHU had an interesting configuration: four compute nodes with 12 total NVIDIA GPUs, evenly mixed between P100 and V100 models. In order to run both Tesla models at the same time, the students needed to slow down the V100s in order to get them in synch with the slower P100s.

Qinghai approached the competition with four nodes and ten NVIDIA V100s, but it wasn’t quite enough to overcome NTHU’s configuration and optimization. Sun Yat-Sen had a total of five nodes and 10 V100s, but the power required by the five nodes was just enough to keep the team from getting the full benefit of their accelerators.

Tsinghua University had a total of 16 NVIDIA V100s, which you’d think would be enough to lock down the number one slot for LINPACK, right? But the team was configured with 6 nodes, and since they had to power all the nodes whether they’re being used for LINPACK or not, this meant they couldn’t devote enough power to their GPUs to get the win.

From a historical perspective, the top score from ASC18 is a very good LINPACK. It’s a lot higher than the previous ASC LINPACK top score and also higher than the score set at ISC17.

However, it’s significantly below the 51.77 teraflops record set at SC17 by the mighty Nanyang Technological University.

Of course, Nanyang was packing a total of 16 P100s on only two nodes, so they had a configuration that was very well suited for the LINPACK benchmark.

In our next article, we’re going to take a look at how the ASC18 field dealt with HPCG – a benchmark that’s much tougher on the hardware and much more like real-life workloads. Stay tuned….

ASC’18: Students Grapple with Grueling Applications

May 13, 2018 · Dan Olds

The ASC competitions are known for the punishingly difficult application tasks they ladle out to students at their annual student cluster competitions. As one long time student participant commented “The applications at ASC just keep getting harder and harder

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, it never stops.”

This year, the competition, held in Nanchang, China, is even more difficult since it’s a day shorter. The students only get two full days to handle their cluster business, rather than the traditional three. So what did the students do over those two days? Glad you asked. Let’s take a look their cluster competition tasks…

Saturday & Sunday

Teams have two days to put their clusters together both physically and mentally. They’re given nodes in boxes and bare racks and it’s their task to put the parts together and wire ‘em up. Then they have to load their software stack (o/s, libraries, management tools, etc.). The students can run anything they want, but the vast majority use CentOS as their operating system of choice.

The rest of Saturday and Sunday are consumed by testing and making final tweaks or wholesale changes to their cluster. Many of the teams at ASC18 overprovisioned their cluster by a wide margin, starting out with 10 or 12 nodes, even though they knew they were probably going to run fewer nodes when the competition started. Their reasoning is that they want to have the maximum amount of flexibility with their config and didn’t want to run the risk that they might not come up with a configuration that couldn’t cut the computational mustard.

A few teams configured systems that were too small to be competitive. They were, assumedly, looking at the label power on the nodes and trying to make sure they were right at the 3,000 watt mark. The better strategy is to over configure and then lower the power draw for each component in order to come in under the power cap. This means throttling back energy usage for CPUs, GPUs, fans, etc., and then testing their optimized applications under those conditions. The top tier teams have mastered these skills.

Big Monday: It just got real

The competition started bright and early at 8:00 am on Monday. The first tasks were familiar ones: the HPL and HPCG benchmarks. There is a cash prize of 10,000 Yuan (about $1,500 US) for the team that wins the Highest LINPACK award, which raises the stakes even higher. HPCG is the more difficult benchmark to run and optimize, and it is also much more of a real world test than HPL, which makes it an important exercise in my mind. There isn’t an award for the highest HPCG, but I think there should be and will lobby that issue with all of the major competitions.

Teams also got the data sets for the RELION application. RELION is a life sciences 3D application that is used in the field of structural biology. It’s used to reconstruct biological structures in situations where x-ray, crystallography, and other methods fail to show the entire structure.

Monday also saw the unveiling of the ‘Mystery Application’, which is an secret application that the teams can’t prepare for. At ASC18, the mystery app was Siesta, which helps researchers perform efficient electronic structure calculations for molecular dynamics simulations. It scales linearly and is highly accurate.

Results for the benchmarks, RELION, and Siesta had to be turned in during the day on Monday.

Tuesday: Heads Down, Keyboards Heat Up

On this, the last day of the competition, students were tasked with running two applications. The first was CFL3D, a computation fluid dynamics program that was developed by NASA Langley in the 1980s. It can be used for simulating and solving fluid-like flows in both 2D and 3D. It’s primarily used for external aerodynamics analysis.

The final application for the students is a challenge dubbed “Answer Prediction for Search Query”, which asks them to build an AI model that can understand a written document and correctly answer a question about it. Their model needs to be able to understand the context of the question in light of the document content – which is a highly sophisticated test.

The results for these applications had to be turned in before the end of day on Tuesday.

Wednesday: The Pressure Cooker

What happened on Wednesday is probably the most nerve racking part of the competition: the judge’s interview. This is where the student teams have to present their methodology and their competition results to a panel of HPC expert judges. After their presentations, the judges question the teams about their approach to the competition, why they did what they did, what they could have done differently, etc. Teams have to be very prepared prior to venturing into this lion’s den, as the judges aren’t known for cutting anyone any slack.

While the judges are all smiling in this picture, don’t let that fool you, they can be savage during the question and answer period with the students. They aren’t mean spirited in any way, but they have a knack for asking exactly the right questions to pinpoint a topic that the students aren’t quite prepared to discuss, or don’t want to discuss. It’s a gift they’ve developed through long experience with students and in the industry.

In our next article, we’re going to look at the results from LINPACK, stay tuned…

Meet Your ASC’18 Teams & Watch Me Struggle With Chinese Words

May 13, 2018 · Dan Olds

Meet Your ASC’18 Teams: Watch me Struggle With Chinese Words

May 13, 2018

It’s time for our annual video meet ‘n greet with the ASC18 Student Cluster Competition teams. Each team took a little time out from their fierce competition to chat with us for a few minutes. We really appreciate the time. And , besides, what better way to commemorate Mother’s Day than to give all the moms out there a chance to see their little darlings battle each other for cluster competition glory?

Team Beihang: Like in most of the videos with the Chinese teams, our trusty translator Susan does a great job telling the students what I’m jabbering at them about and, in turn, telling me how they respond.

Team FAU: They’re in good shape at this point in the competition, but feeling the heat (both literally and figuratively – this is before the ice arrived on the event floor).

Fuzhou University: Susan takes the floor again as our communication lifeline to this team from China.

Team Hong Kong: Our pals at Hong Kong Baptist are in a good mood when we catch up to them on the show floor. We’ve seen these guys over the past three years and they always have great attitudes and are a lot of fun.

Huazhong Agricultural University: The team introduces themselves to me and Susan. We even get a short interview with their advisor, who then leads the team in a cheer – love that enthusiasm.

Team Hungary (University of Miskolc): We meet the team and learn about their various functions. They’re all excited and nervous, which is to be expected, right? The team is also using GPUs for the first time ever, which will give their cluster a kick, but also puts additional pressure on the team from a technical standpoint.

Team Kasetsart: We get a chance to talk to the team and their advisor in the video. This is the only team to ever compete from Thailand, and their second overall appearance. However, this is a wholly new team. This is also the first time the team is using NVIDIA v100 GPUs, but they seem to be fairly comfortable with them.

Team Nanchang: We finally get a chance to interview the home team representing Nanchang University. Susan is again invaluable in helping us communicate with the team. As you can see in the video

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, space is very tight for these teams. Usually they have a 10×10 area, but this barely looks like a 7×5 sized booth.

Team NTHU: This team is from the National Tsing Hua University, located in Taiwan. This university has sent a lot of teams to various cluster competitions throughout the world. As a side note, one of the team members is sporting high performance hair, which he asserts makes him more handsome. The jury is still out on that one.

Team NUDT: This team represents China’s National University of Defense Technology and has participated on many previous cluster competitions. Back in the day, this team was always a threat to take home the LINPACK crown, but they’ve been quiet recently.

Team Qinghai University: This is another first time team at the ASC competition. We don’t know too much about them, but they seem to be doing a fine job of cluster driving. The woman we are interviewing, along with Susan, does a great job of introducing the rest of the team.

Team Shanghai Jiao Tong: Team Shanghai has been around a long time and has even competed at the German ISC competition. While they haven’t won the big prize, they’re well represented by several second place finishes and application awards. This is the fourth time I’ve interviewed this representative of the Team Shanghai, which is great fun.

Team ShanghaiTech: A first time team from a very young university to boot. ShanghaiTech is only 5 years old, having been established in 2013. Despite the youth of their program, this team seems to really be on top of what they’re doing.

Team Southeast University: Southeast University is ably introduced by their captain. It was a concise interview, a ‘just the facts, ma’am’ type of thing. They’re going to let their clustering do the talking.

Saint Petersburg State University: This is the third time the St. Petersburg team has competed at the ASC competition. In the interview, they noted that their team has had problems in the past, but that their goal is steady progress and improvement.

Team Sun Yat-Sen: Our interview with Sun Yat-Sen took quite a while to conduct. They seemed to have much confusion about our simple little interview – how to introduce themselves, how to discuss their jobs, etc. Susan, as always, helped explain what we needed and the interview proceeded without a hitch.

Team Taiyuan: Another team whose name I have difficulty pronouncing, as I prove in the video. Our pal Susan takes over for me and makes sure that the team gets a proper introduction to the millions of people who are rabidly following these competitions.

Team Texas A&M: Finally, a team whose name I can pronounce. When we catch up with the team, they’re getting their machine set up. It turns out that they’ve got their cluster wagon heading down the wrong trail. As I found out later, the team was trying to use desktop Umbuntu as their cluster o/s, rather than the Cent o/s that virtually every other cluster team uses. Plus the team hasn’t been able to practice bringing up a system from scratch at all. This is going to leave a mark. Ouch.

Team Tsinghua: We get a chance to interview the team leader for the multi-championship Team Tsinghua. The team is quietly going about their business with an air of confidence as befits a team that ran away from the field at last year’s competition.

Team Zhejiang: This is a team that has some experience, having competed three times at the ASC event. The team does a good job of introducing themselves, particularly Mark, who is the hardware artist in charge of the cluster.

Hopefully the audio in the videos isn’t too annoying. We were filming in an extremely small space, which put us cheek and jowl with their systems enclosures. However, the quality Sennheiser microphones helped out quite a bit, along with some post production in Adobe Audition. It’s still not as good as it would be in a less crowded venue, but you take what you get and deal with it as best you can – just like the kids in the competition.

ASC’18: Ice Station Nanchang

May 10, 2018 · Dan Olds

It’s a hot Monday in Nanchang, and not just due to the heated competition of the ASC18 Student Cluster Competition. It’s just damned hot. This is a tropical climate where the temperature might not be all that high, but there’s lots of humidity. Judging by today, I think the largest cash crop in Nanyang must be humidity.

Take the natural heat of early summer Nanchang and couple it with a smallish room containing 103 dual processor compute nodes containing 2,884 CPU cores, add 160 NVIDIA V100 GPUs, and around 175 people milling around. We’re not talking about a data center room either. We’re talking a standard university function center with air conditioning that definitely isn’t designed for this kind of heat load. It was hot

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, damned hot.

How hot was it? It was so hot that I drank water for the first time in years. It was sweat through your shirt in five minutes hot. I tried to measure the heat with a widget on my phone, but it just displayed a message saying “please call the fire department.”

The heat really affected the competitors in the early stages of the competition. They are arranged in three aisles that take the shape of a squished figure eight. In the upper and lower aisles , there are five teams and the heat is bearable, since the portable air conditioners are nearby. But where the two circles meet, there are ten teams arranged on a single aisle – and the heat is intense.

6′ Tall AC Unit

In fact, it was so hot that there was concern that during the LINPACK and HPCG runs, when all of the systems are at full crank, we might see some shutdowns due to the overheating.

So how did the competition committee deal with the heat? They used a combination of modern and old school technology. On the modern side, there were three or four large portable air conditioners that were spitting out cold air at a furious rate.

They had equally large heat exchangers pushing heat out into some of the hallways – including one hallway that you had to traverse in order to use the restrooms. It was like walking through a gigantic hot air hand dryer.

However, the air conditioners were overmatched by the outdoor conditions and the raw compute power in the room. Unfortunately, there weren’t any more large scale air conditioners available in the city.

Ice everywhere!

This is where old school tech comes into play. The ASC18 organizers thought fast, made some phone calls, and had a huge number of ice blocks delivered to the competition floor. They were placed into buckets and delivered to the hottest places in the room.

I didn’t think this would have much effect. But I was wrong. Over time, as the ice melted; you could feel a real difference in the conditions. There was also another beneficial side effect: instant ice chest for drinks. I’m proud to say that I was the first to pioneer this usage model, and others soon joined me in storing their drinks in the ice buckets. Oh, and LINPACK and HPCG went off without a hitch. ASC18 organizers used their ingenuity to beat the heat. Great job!

ASC’18: Team Configurations – Less is Still More

May 9, 2018 · Dan Olds

When it comes to hardware, the ASC Student Cluster Competitions are markedly different than what you see at ISC and SC. At the ISC and SC competitions, each team is sponsored by one or more hardware vendors and they build their cluster out of what their hardware vendors offer. At ASC, the entire field is generously sponsored by Inspur, thus everyone builds their clusters out of the same Inspur nodes. This makes the ASC competition more like stock car racing as compared to the SC/ISC Formula 1 style.

You’d think that this would mean that the team hardware configurations would all be about the same. This is an incorrect assumption. Take a look at the hardware configuration chart above. You see that total node count ranges from three nodes on the low end all the way up to 10 nodes

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, with an average node count of just over five. The CPU core count shows a similar disparity, ranging from 576 to 1,920.

Students come into the competition with different ideas. Some teams are aiming at winning the LINPACK prize and design their cluster with few nodes, but then jam GPUs into them like there’s no tomorrow. These teams can be at a disadvantage when it comes to the scientific applications, since those apps might not be as GPU-friendly as LINPACK. Their low CPU count can really hurt them on these applications. It’s a rare team that can field a system that’s competitive at both LINPACK and the scientific applications – although it has happened.

Other teams are looking to win the whole thing, the Overall Championship, so they configure systems that are more balanced between CPUs and GPUs. They could still configure in as many as 16 GPUs in their cluster. But they’d do it on six or eight nodes rather than just four. They would also have to mercilessly throttle down the power consumption of their CPUs and GPUs, depending on what application they’re running at the time. This level of power control takes serious planning, testing, and skills.

Students needed to tell the ASC18 committee how many nodes they desired before the competition. Some teams underestimated their requirements and had to try to get more nodes during the testing phase. A few teams were able to get additional servers, but some were not, which is unfortunate.

The most on the ball teams overprovisioned their clusters like a hungry fat man at the grocery store. They requested ten or even twelve nodes, knowing all along that they were probably only going to run six or eight in the actual competition. The craftiest of teams took the memory off the nodes they weren’t going to use and added it to the nodes in their final cluster, giving them a memory advantage of 2x. Nice move.

Each team was loaned four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs for use during the event, which was very generous of NVIDIA and their Chinese partner LeadTek. More than half of the teams brought their own GPUs along to augment the four from NVIDIA, which is perfectly within the rules of the competition.

It’s interesting to note how the clusters of today compare to the clusters from just a year ago. Notice that the average node count has dropped from 6.5 to 5.5 today. Average CPU core count per system has dropped from 182 to 144, and we’ve even seen a drop in the average number of accelerators. What’s happening?

What we’re seeing is two trends coming together. The students now have access to much more powerful systems, CPUs, and accelerators. This new tech can accomplish much more work than the components from even 12 months ago. However, there’s a price to pay for speed. It’s the impact on the power budget. These new components are power hungry, which forces the teams to have smaller configurations.

I’ve seen the same trend at the SC and ISC competitions. Back in the earlier days of the competitions, it wasn’t unusual to see a ten node configuration and the average was probably around eight nodes. But today, the students can get much more performance out of much smaller systems – all while using the same amount of power. Ain’t technology grand?

Stay tuned for more exciting updates from ASC18…..

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