China’s Team Diablo Turns Up the Heat to Win SC15 Student Cluster Competition

Tsinghua University Claims Third Cluster Competition Title this Year

Team Diablo from Tsinghua University, the overall winners of the SC15 Student Cluster Competition.

Team Diablo, a team of undergraduate students from Tsinghua University in China, won the top prize in the Student Cluster Competition at the SC15 conference in Austin, Texas. A team from Germany, Team TUMuch Phun from the Technical University of Munich, won the award for achieving highest performance for the Linpack benchmark.

For the Tsinghua University team, this was their third win, coming on the heels of victories at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany and the Asia Supercomputing Community Student Supercomputer Challenge.

When they were announced as SC15 winners at the Thursday, Nov. 19, awards session, the team let out a whoop and went to the stage to collect their certificates.

“After they announced it, we were really excited,” said Youwei Zhou, a senior undergraduate student and team spokesman. “Our secret is teamwork and each member is capable of understanding the hardware and software. When we get stuck on a problem and cannot progress, we always figure it out with more people working on it. We also find potential performance increases this way.”

Zhou also said the each of this year’s winning teams from his university consisted of different students.

The Student Cluster Competition, which debuted at SC07 in Reno and has since been replicated in Europe, Asia and Africa, is a real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge in which teams of six undergraduates assemble a small cluster at SC15 and race to complete a real-world workload across a series of scientific applications, demonstrate knowledge of system architecture and application performance, and impress HPC industry judges.  

The students partner with vendors to design and build a cutting-edge cluster from commercially available components, not to exceed a 3120-watt power limit and work with application experts to tune and run the competition codes.

The award for Student Cluster Competition Overall Winner is based on the combined score for correctly completed workload, benchmark performance, demonstrated understanding of architecture and performance through profiling and analysis, and interviews.

In addition to the teams from China and Germany, the SC15 Student Cluster Competition line-up included:

●      Team Desert Heat, Arizona Research Computing, United States

●      Illinois Institute of Technology, United States

●      National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

●      Northeastern University, United States

●      Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, Australia

●      Universidad EAFIT, Colombia

●      University of Oklahoma, United States

The Student Cluster Competition is part of the Students@SC Program. Funding for the SC15 Student Cluster Competition was provided by IEEE/ACM SC15 and supported by Allinea and Schlumberger.

SC15 Student Cluster Competition Fires Things Up with Secret Sauce

SCC Secret Sauce

Salsa secreta. Geheime Sosse. Secret sauce. 紹兴. 沙茶.  

No matter how you say it, that extra special ingredient known only to you can sometimes make all the difference in the world. And that’s just what nine teams of students are hoping as they converge on Austin, Texas, to demonstrate their prowess in the SC15 Student Cluster Competition. This year’s competition will feature teams from the Australia, China, Colombia, Germany, Taiwan and the United States.

SC15 attendees are encouraged to drop by the Student Cluster Competition in the southwest corner of the first floor of the Austin Convention Center and get in on some of the secret sauce firing up the competition. Attendees who visit the competition and speak with at least four of the teams will get both inside information and the very own bottle of Student Cluster Competition Secret Sauce.

“We wanted to spice things up this year and since we are in Austin, what better way than by giving out bottles of secret sauce?” said SC15 Student Cluster Competition Chair Hai Ah Nam of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The competition, which officially kicks off at 5 p.m. Monday, Nov. 16, pits the nine teams against each other in this high-energy event featuring young supercomputing talent from around the world competing to build and operate powerful cluster computers. In this real-time, non-stop, 48-hour competition, teams of undergraduate and/or high school students assemble small cluster computers on the SC15 exhibit floor and race to complete a real-world workload across a series of applications and impress HPC industry judges.

First held at SC07 in Reno, the Student Cluster Competition has proven so popular that it has been replicated in Europe, Africa and Asia.

“It’s a global event in every sense, from the teams to the appreciation by those watching, who understand they are seeing the future of HPC,” said Stephen Harrell of Purdue University, who has taken several Purdue teams to compete in the U.S. and Germany.

And those SC15 attendees who drop by the competition will be able to take home a small reminder of what fires up the competitive juices when students get together to show their stuff.

Getting to Know the Student Cluster Competition Teams

From left, the Technische Universität München team is: Michael Zellner, Gregor Matl, Felix Thimm, Daniel Gallenberger, Felix Spaeth, and Sharru Moeller.

The following is an interesting look at one of the nine Student Cluster Competition teams competing in Austin this November. Click here to learn more about some of the other teams.

For what reasons are you studying computer science?

• The joy of building something new combined with an interest in computers since childhood.
• Enjoyment in creating new things while using innovative computer systems.
• Enjoyment in trying to solve problems and a general interest in innovative computer systems.
• It really influences daily life and most of all, it is fascinating!

In what other events like this have you competed? Was that as a team or individually?  One student has previously competed in the German Federal Competition of Computer Science, which deals with algorithms in a rather theoretical way, and the International Olympics of Informatics (IOI), which also requires the algorithms implementations.

Of those two competitions, he won the first one and became a bronze medalist in the latter. He also competed in the (International Collegiate Programming Contest) ICPC on regional level (as a team) and other programming challenges like the Google Code Jam (Individually, advanced to top 500).
  
What training routine are you following to prepare for this year's SCC15 competition?
We are meeting every other week to discuss our progress with respect to the codes. Furthermore, we have the unique possibility to access the LRZ SuperMIC cluster.

Describe your team's distributed application responsibilities based on experience and interest:

• My primary role is the RepastHPC (Zombie) code because I have experience with OpenGL and Paraview.
• I am responsible for Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) and post-processing. WRF because I have a great experience with paraview and blender. My responsibly for WRF evolves from my interest in climatic simulations, which never stops challenging me.
• I'm mainly focusing on Trinity and Linpack. Further, I am focusing on system administration tasks with a special focus on tuning the overall system for maximum efficiency.
• My focus is on the MILC and the Trinity applications mainly because I'm interested in those algorithms.
• I am concentrating on the WRF and MILC codes.  

What have been some challenges preparing for the competition?

• Getting all of WRFs additional libraries to compile fine with the Intel compiler has proven to be a challenge. We're making progress, though
• Compiling the library's for the Repast Code with the Intel compiler for the Xeon Phi cluster.
• Developing the post-processing of the WRF code was quiet challenging. Trying not to give too much away yet, but this could possibly lead us to an advantage in the competition.
• So far the most challenging assignment is getting the programs to run on the LRZ SuperMIC.
• Installing all the Trinity plugins on the SuperMIC has been the hardest part up until now, but we now know those plugins structures and dependencies inside and out. 

Describes what has been relatively easy so far:

• The easiest part was getting the Zombie code running on my laptop. It just worked as described in the ReadMe.
• I must admit getting WRF to work was easy for there is very detailed documentation online
• Running the MILC application really was a piece of cake. It just works out of the box.

What architectural details can you share that will put fear into the hearts of your competitors?Our system will have multiple Xeon Phi coprocessor cards per node which will allow us to crunch huge amounts of data with high efficiency, especially with respect to power consumption.

What do you like about mysteries? How are your preparing for the mystery application?It is the unknown people fear most - that is what makes the mystery application the real challenge. Not knowing what preparation is necessary, but believing that we can do it is important. It gives us a chance to demonstrate the knowledge about our machine as well as the flexibility of our team.

We are preparing for the mystery application by trying to make applications from previous years Student Cluster Challenges. Further, we try to find other popular codes with interesting properties or system requirements through HPC-related news and conferences. By doing this, we get more experience in working with unknown applications in general.

Why do you want to win? What are you willing to do to win?Our advisors and sponsors expect us to do our best. We can't let them down! We are prepared for long hours in front of our available HPC systems to be able to utilize our final cluster setup as efficient as possible.

What are you planning to do after the competition is over?A few of us are going to stay in the United States a bit and will get to know Texas! Among other places, the plan is to visit the Houston Space Center. And, besides school, there are many more competitions waiting for us!

Meet the SC15 Student Cluster Competition Chair: Hai Ah Nam

The SC15 Student Cluster Chair Hai Ah Nam from Los Alamos National Laboratory.

In 1999, the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Hai Ah Nam left graduate school for a summer hiatus to take care of her ailing father and save a marriage that was cracking under the grad school pressure. The summer hiatus ended up lasting five years.

“I had a master’s degree in physics at that point,” Nam says, “but it wasn’t getting me anywhere in southern California. I went to work in the internet industry for a while and then taught high school math, but it wasn’t fulfilling that part of me that wanted to know more, do more.”

By now a single parent with an 18-month-old daughter, Nam sat down at her desk one evening and took stock.

“I felt nearly as lost as when I had first gone off to college,” Nam recalls. “I loved physics, but I did not see a path forward and needed to take a step back.”

Nam was at a turning point and in the end decided to join another graduate school, but this time a joint doctoral program in computational science through San Diego State University and Claremont Graduate University.

“Going back to school when everyone else was at least five years younger and didn’t have to rush home after classes to struggle with the joys of potty training was tough,” Nam notes with a smile. “I had to push down a lot of insecurities and convince myself that the sacrifice would pay off.”

While spending her summers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Nam was asked whether she would be interested in helping the 2007 Student Cluster Competition as a volunteer. Although she was not sure what the competition entailed or how to fit it into her busy schedule, she said yes and was glad she did. The initial yes ended up leading to a wide variety of professional development and networking opportunities, including staff positions at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and now Los Alamos, and a new husband to boot.

Nam with SCC co-chair Tiki Suarez-Brown and Awards Chair Jack Dongarra with the 2010 SCC winner, University of Texas at Austin.

Student Cluster Competition
Since volunteering for her first Student Cluster Competition, Nam has been an active member of the event’s organizational team and in 2010 served as that year’s Student Cluster Competition chair.

“Over 10,000 high-performance computing professionals and students from all over the world attend SC annually, which includes the Student Cluster Competition,” Nam explains. “Students from as far away as Australia, Colombia and China compete on the global stage to build and operate powerful cluster computers—smaller versions of high-capacity supercomputers—and everyone has a lot of fun.”

But offering chances to compete and have fun are only part of the event’s contributions.

“The Student Cluster Competition provides students with training beyond what they are able to get through their universities,” Nam says, “and they learn about new research, have a chance to network and get a taste of future career paths that they probably never even knew existed.”

Click here to read the full article.

Click here for more information about the Student Cluster Competition.

Article courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Learn How the Student Cluster Competition Transforms Careers

SC15 is set to hold another nail-biting Student Cluster Competition, or SCC, now in its ninth year, as an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition. Held as part of SC15's Students@SC, the Student Cluster Competition is designed to introduce the next generation of students to the high-performance computing community. Over the years, the competition has drawn teams from around the world.

In this real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge, teams of undergraduate and/or high school students assemble a small cluster on the SC15 exhibit floor and race to complete a real-world workload across a series of applications and impress HPC industry judges.

Teams of six (6) students partner with vendors to design and build a cutting-edge cluster from commercially available components that does not exceed a 3120-watt power limit (26-amp at 120-volt), and work with application experts to tune and run the competition codes.

Click the link below to hear from some of last year's participants as to why this is such a special opportunity for the next generation of computer scientists.