Three teams of competitors will be making long overseas journeys to the SC13 Student Cluster Competition. The event will kick off on November 18th in Denver at the annual SC13 Supercomputing Conference.
These teams will be competing in the Big Iron division, where undergraduate students design, build, and tune their very own HPC clusters. They’ll be running HPC benchmarks and scientific applications to see which team has the fastest system and has done the best job of learning about scientific computing.
There are a total of eight teams vying for the Big Iron Overall Championship crown (there isn’t an actual crown) and the Highest LINPACK Scepter of Honor (and there isn’t an actual scepter, unfortunately.) Let’s take a look at the teams who are traveling the farthest:
Team Australia: Australia’s iVEC, a joint venture between the country’s national science agency and several of its universities, is fielding the first team from Down Under. They’re not only Down Under, but very Far Away too, given their location in Perth (8,700 air miles from Denver).
The idea for forming Team Australia (which perhaps should be dubbed Team Dingo as in, “The dingo ran your LINPACK”) came from iVEC representatives attending SC12 in Salt Lake City who observed that cluster competition. They see the contest as a way to foster home-grown HPC talent from Australian universities.
Team Dingo (see, that nickname is already catching on… yay) has undergone, as they said in their application, “…the ultimate training schedule.” In addition to taking academic courses, the team is receiving special training from iVEC personnel and getting attention from hardware sponsor SGI’s top HPC expert in the Asia Pacific region.
The Fighting Dingoes certainly bring a lot of enthusiasm into the competition. They’ve been updating their activities and progress on Twitter (you can find them at https://twitter.com/iVEC_SCCTeam). They got our attention by tweeting about their “seriously awesome kit from SGI” and the arrival of their Telsa GPUs back in August.
Team Germany: The other rookie team from afar hails from Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU). FAU is one of Germany’s top research universities, ranked as the 179th best Engineering & Technology School on the 2013 QS university ranking scale.
The FAU application was one of the better that I’ve seen over the years, leading the reader through the criteria they used to evaluate their hardware choices. They even cited Amdahl’s Law, which is one of my very favorite laws of computing.
They very clearly and concisely discussed the hardware options they considered and their eventual choices. They outlined the thin node (single CPU) vs. fat (quad-socket) node arguments, touching on inter-node communication needs and the cost in terms of energy usage.
They also talked about accelerators in detail, including their decision criteria and a discussion of the trade-offs involved in deciding the balance of CPUs to accelerators per node. Very good stuff indeed.
I didn’t see any information on the composition of the team, their individual experience, or how they are approaching the application tasks. However, I did discover that German HPC vendor Megware is sponsoring the team, which means they are in pretty good hands.
Megware was the sponsor behind the Chemnitz University “Coffee Table of Doom” LINK that competed at the ISC13 competition in Leipzig last summer. Given this, I would expect to see Team Germany arrive in Denver prepped to the hilt (or even higher).
Team China: To avid followers of SCC competitions, China’s National University of Defense Technology needs no introduction. NUDT finished second overall in their first bout at SC11 in Seattle. They placed second again at ISC’12 but topped the field in LINPACK. At SC12 in Salt Lake City, they placed – yes, second again – and turned in the – you guessed it – highest LINPACK score (3.014 TFlops/s).
They were one of the first teams to effectively utilize GPUs, optimizing non-GPU centric apps for GPU acceleration. This was quite a surprise to observers in 2011, but given the heritage of the team (they get to practice on Tianhe-1, which was 2010’s #1 on the Top500 list), it isn’t hard to understand why this is a team that should be seen as a serious competitor.
Although I haven’t seen the NUDT entrance application, I’m sure they’re bringing some competition veterans to Denver. I’m expecting that they will bring a Xeon system backed by a heaping helping of NVIDIA Tesla accelerators. I would also guess that long-term sponsor Inspur is once again supporting NUDT’s efforts.
In our next article, we’ll take a look at the US home teams and see how they stack up against the international competition.
Posted In: Latest News, SC 2013 Denver
Tagged: supercomputing, Student Cluster Competition, HPC, National University of Defense Technology, NUDT, SC 2013, iVEC, FAU, Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Meet the teams
chris_bloke
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RT @Student_C_C: Teams from Germany, China, & Australia seek #HPC glory at #SC13 @Supercomputing @iVEC_SCCTeam http://t.co/a3kHymwH23
ivec_wa
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RT @Student_C_C: Teams from Germany, China, & Australia seek #HPC glory at #SC13 @Supercomputing @iVEC_SCCTeam http://t.co/a3kHymwH23
markgbeckett
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RT @Student_C_C: Teams from Germany, China, & Australia seek #HPC glory at #SC13 @Supercomputing @iVEC_SCCTeam http://t.co/a3kHymwH23
iVEC_SCCTeam
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RT @Student_C_C: Teams from Germany, China, & Australia seek #HPC glory at #SC13 @Supercomputing @iVEC_SCCTeam http://t.co/a3kHymwH23
danolds
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RT @Student_C_C: Teams from Germany, China, & Australia seek #HPC glory at #SC13 @Supercomputing @iVEC_SCCTeam http://t.co/a3kHymwH23
Student_C_C
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Teams from Germany, China, & Australia seek #HPC glory at #SC13 @Supercomputing @iVEC_SCCTeam http://t.co/a3kHymwH23
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