In this video from ISC 2016 in Frankfurt, Gilad Shainer from the HPC Advisory Council hosts the Student Cluster Awards Ceremony.
The overall winning team this year was from CHPC in South Africa. As repeat winners, CHPC is establishing a bit of dynasty in this competition that is really fun to watch.
ISC 2016 Student Cluster Competition Winners
- Overall winner: CHPC South Africa
- Fan Favorite: Universitat Politècnica De Catalunya Barcelona Tech (UPC)
- Highest LINPACK: Huazhong University of Science and Technology
- Third Place Overall: Shanghai Jiao Tong University
- Second Place Overall: Tsinghua University
Linpack Results
While the overall competition includes a wide range of applications, the student’s ability to tune their clusters for the Linpack benchmark (the basis of the TOP500 list) has always garnered a lot of attention. This year was no exception, as the winning team was able to get 12.57 Teraflops of performance with 3000 Watts of power.
Last week we saw not one, but two teams top the current 12.03 TFLOPS record that was established at the ASC16 spring competition,” said Dan Olds from OrionX and editor of StudentClusterComp.com.
“Team HUST, from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, set the new high-water mark with their HPL score of 12.57 TFLOPS. The team was running a four-node, 112-core cluster with eight Nvidia K80 accelerators. This award is icing on the cake for Team HUST, coming on the heels of their ASC16 win last spring.”
In what many may see as a surprise, home team Hamburg nailed down a very close second place finish with 12.29 TFLOPS – just a few FLOPS behind the winner. They achieved this with their two-node, 56-core, eight-K80 configuration – complete with a custom wooden rack.
Team Nanyang, with their three-node, 72-core, 6-K80 GPU, notched a third place finish. South Africa, with their larger 8-node cluster, grabbed an honorable mention in fourth place.
Putting this into historical context, we see a near linear progression of high scores starting at SC13.
The next Student Cluster competition takes place in November at SC16 in Salt Lake City.
