One of the highlight of the annual SC conference is the Student Cluster Competition, where student teams race to build the fastest HPC cluster. For SC16, the conference is looking for your help improve the application benchmark suite.
SC, the leading conference in the field, wants to promote and support replication and reproducibility through a new initiative that aims to integrate aspects of past technical papers into the Student Cluster Competition (SCC). SC16 invites authors of technical papers accepted at past SC conferences, including SC15, to submit proposals for case studies based on applications and tests in their SC paper that can be transformed into benchmarks for the SCC. This initiative provides SC authors with the unique opportunity to further promote their published research as an example of replicable and reproducible experimental computer science. Chosen authors will be recognized in a press release and receive a certificate of recognition from SIGHPC.”
The SCC runs for about 48 hours straight during which teams of students build and test high-end clusters whose configuration can range from 6-18 nodes with a minimum memory of 2GB per core. Clusters are equipped with a mix of conventional CPUs (e.g., Intel and AMD) and GPU (e.g., NVIDIA K20, K40, K80) or Xeon Phi, but may also contain novel architectures.
A suitable code for the case study must meet these requirements:
- The code must be usable on most architectures
- The code should be able to run at least on conventional CPUs. Preference will be given to codes that also support GPU, Phi or ARM.
- Competition data set must be completable on a 6-10 TFlop cluster within 12-24 hours OR have a way to score incompleteness
- The runs that the competing students are asked to reproduce must be able to run on a cluster described above.
- The code must be open source and/or can be made available to student team (including international teams – no export control issues)
- Examples of data sets must be available for student teams to learn the application
- Data sets and results from the paper need to be made available to the students and committee
- All data sets and results need to fit into 500GB
In this video from SC15, Rich Brueckner from insideHPC talks to contestants in the Student Cluster Competition.
For more information, check out the SCC Call for Participation.
