Radio Free HPC Reviews the SC16 Student Cluster Competition Configurations & Results

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bubble4In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the results from SC16 Student Cluster Competition. 

The Student Cluster Competition returned for its 10th year at SC16, The 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 SC16 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.

This year, the advent of clusters with the new Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs made a huge impact, nearly tripling the Linpack record for the competition.

For the first-time ever, the team that won top honors also won the award for achieving highest performance for the Linpack benchmark application. The team “SwanGeese” is from the University of Science and Technology of China. In traditional Chinese culture, the rare Swan Goose stands for teamwork, perseverance and bravery. This is the university’s third appearance in the competition.

Also, an ACM SIGHPC Certificate of Appreciation is presented to the authors of a recent SC paper to be used for the SC16 Student Cluster Competition Reproducibility Initiative. The selected paper was “A Parallel Connectivity Algorithm for de Bruijn Graphs in Metagenomic Applications” by Patrick Flick, Chirag Jain, Tony Pan and Srinivas Aluru from Georgia Institute of Technology.

radioAfter that, we go round-robin for our Catch of the Week:

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See our complete coverage of SC16, which takes place Nov. 13-18 in Salt Lake City.