SC15 Awards Recap: Part 1

Once again, the SC Awards Ceremony was an entertaining event and one of the many highlights of conference week. This year, the SC15 Award Co-Chairs were Padma Raghavan and Franck Cappello who helped open the SC15 Awards Ceremony

According to Cappello, “The awards are very important for the SC conference series. They celebrate the best and the brightest of High Performance Computing [HPC].  The selection of the finalists and winners follow a very strict and codified process, involving many members of the program committee.”

SC15 Award Co-Chairs were Padma Raghavan and Franck Cappello.

He continued, “Awards are not just plaques or certificates. They define excellence. They set the bar for the years to come. They are a very powerful inspiration for young and senior researchers.”

Raghavan added that even being an award finalist at SC15 is already an achievement in itself. Following is a brief summary of some of the SC15 award winners.

SC15 Student Cluster Competition
The Student Cluster Competition is comprised of two awards: the first for the Highest LINPACK and the 2nd for the Overall Winner. These awards showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition.   It’s a non-stop, real-time, 48-hour challenge where students race to assemble a small cluster at SC15 to demonstrate the greatest sustained performance across a series of applications.

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 Student Cluster competition is supported by Allinea and Schlumberger.

The first Student Cluster Competition award - Highest LINPACK Benchmark - went to Team TUMuch Phun, Technische Universität from München, Germany.       

Team TUMuch Phun, Technische Universität from München, Germany, receive the Highest LINPACK Benchmark award from SC15 Student Cluster Competition Chair, Hai-Ah Nam (far right). 

The Overall Student Cluster Competition winner was determined based on a combined score for correctly completed workload, benchmark performance, demonstrated understanding of architecture and performance through profiling and analysis, and interviews. This year’s winner was Team Diablo from Tsinghua University in China.

Team Diablo, Tsinghua University in China, celebrate winning the SC15 Student Cluster Competition.

Technical Papers Program

Jeffrey S. Vetter, SC15 Technical Program Chair, presents interesting data from this year’s submissions during the SC15 awards ceremony in Austin, Texas.

The Technical Papers Program is one of SC’s most valued components.  Each year SC receives submissions of original research that introduce new ideas to the field and stimulate future trends in HPC.  As in previous years, it was a tough competition, with 361 paper submissions covering a wide range of research interests and topics.

The committee met for two days in June to review the Papers. At the conclusion of the meeting, the committee had accepted 78 papers, which is a 22 percent acceptance rate.  Of the 78 papers, nine have been selected as finalists for the Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards.

Please note,  all technical papers are available at the ACM Digital Library and can be accessed by clicking here.

Best Student Paper

"Parallel Distributed Memory Construction of Suffix and Longest Common Prefix Arrays” by Patrick Flick and Srinivas Aluru was selected as the SC15 best student paper.

Patrick Flick’s and Srinivas Aluru’s winning paper proposes a novel algorithm for the suffix array problem. The performance results are very impressive and demonstrate a hundred fold improvement over existing methods. The algorithm itself has a potential broad impact on the field of genomics.

The three other finalists were:

• Adaptive and Transparent Cache Bypassing for GPUs - with Ang Li from Eindhoven University of Technology as the lead author.
• A Case for Application-Oblivious Energy - Efficient MPI Runtime- with Akshay Venkatesh - Ohio State University as the lead author.
• GraphReduce: Processing Large-Scale Graphs on Accelerator - Based Systems - with Dipanjan Sengupta - Georgia Institute of Technology as the lead author

Best Overall Paper
 

The SC15 Best Paper, ”ScaAnalyzer — A Tool to Identify Memory Scalability Bottlenecks in Parallel Programs” by Xu Liu and Bo Wu.

Xu Liu’s and Bo Wu’s winning paper proposes methods and tools that isolate the causes of memory bottlenecks in both hardware and software in advanced computing systems. The committee felt the fundamental contributions address the memory wall problem and could have wide applicability in software development at Exascale.

The Best Paper authors (with certificates from left) Bo Wu and Xu Liu receive their awards from members of the SC15 Awards Committee who are (from left) Padma Raghavan, Eva Deelman and José Moreira, co-chairs of the SC15 Technical Papers Committee, and Franck Cappello.

The other finalists were:

• Massively Parallel Phase-Field Simulations for Ternary Eutectic Directional Solidification - with Martin Bauer - FAU Erlangen Nuremberg as the lead author.
• Efficient Implementation of Quantum Materials Simulations on Distributed CPU-GPU Systems - with Raffaele Solcà - ETH Zurich as the lead author.
• Adaptive and Transparent Cache Bypassing for GPU's - with Ang Li - Eindhoven University of Technology as lead author.
• Exploiting Asynchrony from Exact Forward Recovery for DUE in Iterative Solvers - with Luc Jaulmes - Barcelona Supercomputing Center as the lead author.
• PGX.D: A Fast Distributed Graph Processing System - with Sungpack Hong - Oracle Corporation as the lead author. 

Check back here for additional coverage of other SC15 award winners in the near future.

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.

SC15 Panel Line-Up for Nov. 18th

Supercomputing and Big Data: From Collision to Convergence

As data intensive science emerges, the need for high performance computing (HPC) to converge capacity and capabilities with Big Data becomes more apparent and urgent. Capacity requirements have stemmed from science data processing and the creation of large scale data products (e.g., earth observations, Large Hadron Collider, square-kilometer array antenna) and simulation model output (e.g., flight mission plans, weather and climate models).

Capacity growth is further amplified by the need for more rapidly ingesting, analyzing, and visualizing voluminous data to improve understanding of known physical processes, discover new phenomena, and compare results.

• How does HPC need to change in order to meet these Big Data needs?
• What can HPC and Big Data communities learn from each other?
• What impact will this have on conventional workflows, architectures, and tools?

An invited international panel of experts will examine these disruptive technologies and consider their long-term impacts and research directions.

Moderator/Panelist Details:

• George O. Strawn (Moderator) - Networking and Information Technology Research and Development National Coordination Office
• David Bader - Georgia Institute of Technology
• Ian Foster - University of Chicago
• Bruce Hendrickson - Sandia National Laboratories
• Randy Bryant - Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy
• George Biros - The University of Texas at Austin
• Andrew W. Moore - Carnegie Mellon University

Mentoring Undergraduates Through Competition

SC14 Group Photo of the SCC Teams

The next generation of HPC talent will face significant challenges to create software ecosystems and optimally use the next generation of HPC systems. The rapid advances in HPC make it difficult for academic institutions to keep pace.

The Student Cluster Competition (SCC), now in its ninth year, was created to address this issue by immersing students into all aspects of HPC. This panel will examine the impact of the SCC on the students and schools that have participated.

Representatives from five institutions from around the world will talk about their experiences with the SCC with regards to their students' career paths, integration with curriculum and academic HPC computing centers.

The panel will further discuss whether "extracurricular" activities, such as the SCC, provide sufficient return on investment and what activities could change or replace the competition to meet these goals more effectively.

Moderator/Panelist Details:

• Brent Gorda (Moderator) - Intel Corporation
• Jerry Chou - Tsinghua University
• Rebecca Hartman-Baker - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Doug Smith - University of Colorado Boulder
• Xuanhua Shi - Huazhong University of Science and Technology
• Stephen Lien Harrell - Purdue University 

 

Programming Models for Parallel Architectures and Requirements for Pre-Exascale

Relying on domain scientists to provide programmer intervention to develop applications to emerging exascale platforms is a real challenge. A scientist prefers to express mathematics of the science, not describe the parallelism of the implementing algorithms.

Do we expect too much of the scientist to code for high parallel performance given the immense capabilities of the platform. This ignores that the scientist may have a mandate to code for a new architecture, and yet preserve portability in their code.

This panel will bring together user experience, programming model, architecture experts to discuss the pressing needs in finding the path forward to port scientific codes to such a platform. We hope to discuss the evolving programming stack, application-level requirements, and address the hierarchical nature of large systems in terms of different cores, memory levels, power consumption and the pragmatic advances of near term technology.

Moderator/Panelist Details:

• Fernanda Foertter (Moderator) - Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Barbara Chapman - University of Houston
• Steve Oberlin - NVIDIA Corporation
• Satoshi Matsuoka - Tokyo Institute of Technology
• Jack Wells - Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Si Hammond - Sandia National Laboratories

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.

SC15 Selects 9 Teams for Student Cluster Competition

It's that time of year again, teams from across the world are preparing to compete in the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) at SC15.  This year the SCC is proud to host 9 teams that will battle it out to showcase their hardware and computing might to battle zombie invasions, hurricanes, exotic particles, gene reconstruction and MORE!

The selected teams are from  the following organizations/countries:

Arizona Tri-University Team — US
Illinois Institute of Technology — US
National Tsing Hua University — Taiwan
Northeastern University (OpenCompute New England) — US
Pawsey Supercomputing Centre — Australia
Technische Universität München — Germany
Tsinghua University — China
Universidad EAFIT — Colombia
University of Oklahoma — US

For more information about the competition please click here.  Best of luck to all the participants.

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.

Students: Increase Your Application Speed – Student Cluster Competition Deadline is April 17, 2015

SC14 SCC Participants

The clock is ticking down for teams to submit their applications for the SC15 Student Cluster Competition. The deadline to apply for a spot in this year’s competition is Friday, April 17.

Launched at SC07 to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition, the Student Cluster Competition aims to introduce the next generation of students to the high-performance computing community. Over the years, the competition has drawn teams from Australia, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Russia, Taiwan and the United States.

Team proposals must be submitted via the SC15 submission site by clicking here.

Team applications due: April 17, 2015
Email Contact: student-cluster-competition@info.supercomputing.org
Click here for more on the Student Cluster Competition

Students: Increase Your Application Speed – Student Cluster Competition Deadline is April 17

Students hard at work during the SC14 Student Cluster Competition.

The clock is ticking down for teams to submit their applications for the SC15 Student Cluster Competition. The deadline to apply for a spot in this year’s competition is Friday, April 17. The Student Cluster Competition is a high energy event featuring young supercomputing talent from around the world competing to build and operate powerful cluster computers during the conference.

Launched at SC07 to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited, the Student Cluster Competition aims to introduce the next generation of students to the high-performance computing community. Over the years, the competition has drawn teams from Australia, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Russia, Taiwan and the United States.

How the Challenge Works
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. Prior to the competition, teams work with their advisor and vendor partners 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.

Team proposals must be submitted via the SC15 submission site available by clicking here.

The SC14 Massachusetts Green Team Explains Why the Student Cluster Competition Matters

The Massachusetts Great Team hard at work at SC14.

"The SC Student Cluster Competitions allow students to learn and advance their education and knowledge, supplying an extraordinary, unique and concrete experience in the field of supercomputing. The Student Cluster Competition at SC14 provided a real, hands-on glimpse into the world of supercomputing. Scaling tests and optimizations allowed the competitor such as myself to say what’s working, what’s better, and best of all: why and how.

Where else could you manage and tweak your own supercomputer to squeeze out the extra flop of speed, and also immediately see the effect in both the LINPACK benchmark as well as the relevant application? SCC14 provided the environment and configuration for both the supercomputing experimentation as well as the delicious knowledge that yes, you had taken that extra step and found yourself at the top with the fastest supercomputer against a spectrum of the fastest."

Student Cluster Competition from a Student’s Perspective

SC14 Purdue University and EAUSIT University (Colombia) SCC team. Back row from left to right: Alejandro Gomez, Matt Molo, and Kurt Kroeger. Front Row from left to right: Pablo Restrepo, Mateo Gomez, and Fangning Cheng.

My name is Kurt Kroeger, a senior Computer Science major at Purdue University, and I participated on the SC12 and SC14 Purdue University Student Cluster Competition teams. I first heard about SCC through my co-workers at RCAC (Rosen Center for Advanced Computing) who had participated on the SC11 team and told us about openings for the SC12 team.

Participating in both the SC12 and SC14 competitions has been a rewarding experience for me for a variety of reasons. I was able to gain knowledge on hardware, distributed computing, high performance computing, and scientific computing, which are usually not taught or available to students until they have entered graduate school or the workforce.

For my first time participating in the SCC competition, I was brand new to HPC and supercomputing in general. My experience and performance at SC12 and ISC'13 allowed me to return for SC14.   The second time around I felt more comfortable with the competition as I had previous experience.  Also, I was given more responsibility, which allowed me to take more of a leadership role on my team.

SC12 Purdue team from left to right (facing the camera): Kurt Kroeger, Andrew Huff, Nick Molo, and Tyler Reid.

Being able to attend SC is an experience in and of itself. Talking to the universities and vendors allows you to connect with a wide variety of industry professionals that you wouldn't be able to meet anywhere else. I am graduating in Fall of 2015, and this summer will be an intern at EMC Isilon which creates distributed storage solutions.

I will look back fondly of my time participating in Student Cluster Competition and I wish the best for future competitors!

SC15 Announces Student Cluster Competition Details

Last year’s overall SCC winner was the team from University of Texas – Austin – pictured here with SCC14 co-chairs Dustin Leverman (far left) and Barbara Chapman (far right) .

SC15 is excited to hold another nail-biting Student Cluster Competition, or SCC, now in its 9th year, as an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition. Held as part of SC15 Student Programs, the SCC is designed to introduce the next generation of students to the high-performance computing community. Over the years, the competition has drawn teams from throughout the United States and 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. In the competition, 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.

More information about this year’s competition can be found here:Competition Rules & Submission Guidelines and Competition Applications

Important Dates
Team submissions to compete in the SC15 SCC will be accepted from February 2, 2015 - April 17, 2015. Notifications of team acceptance into the SC15 SCC will go out the week of May 11, 2015.

Team submissions must be completed here.

NOTE:  Teams that are accepted to the competition will need to submit a final architecture proposal by October 2, 2015 through the submission site.

Contact the organizing committee here:
student-cluster-competition@info.supercomputing.org 

Frequently updated information about the competition details can be found here.

Sponsors
The SCC is funded by the SC conference and by generous sponsors who understand the importance of building the next generation of HPC.  If you are interested in sponsoring the SCC, please contact us for sponsorship levels and benefits.  Sponsorship levels range from $5,000 to $25,000.

How SC15 is Transforming Student Lives

Attention students! Applications are now open for the ‪#‎SC15‬ Student Cluster Competition. Show off your ‪#‎HPC‬ skills and apply here: http://bit.ly/1z74LW8

Still have more questions? Check out this video for some insights into how this competition transforms lives:

‪#‎STEM‬ ‪#‎TechEd‬ ‪#‎Compsci‬ ‪#‎HPCtransforms‬ ‪#‎HPCmatters‬