GPU Systems Win 8th Straight Student Cluster Competition

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winningteamISCOver at the Nvidia Blog, George Millington writes that, for the eighth time running, an NVIDIA GPU accelerator-based system powered the winning team in a major international student cluster competition. This time, the team from CHPC South Africa won the ISC’14 Student Cluster Challenge, edging out 10 other teams from around the world for top honors.

Besides powering the overall winning system, NVIDIA GPUs led the University of Edinburgh to achieve a record score on HPC industry standard Linpack performance benchmark. The team’s Tesla K40 GPU-powered system reached 10.14 teraflops —the first time any student cluster team has hit this mark within the competition’s three-kilowatt power budget. The previous record of 9.27 teraflops was hit just a few months ago by China’s Sun Yat-sen University at the Asia student competition, ASC14, also with GPU accelerators.

In addition to running industry benchmarks, systems were scored on how well they performed on a number of real-world applications including Quantum ESPRESSO, a materials science application, Open FOAM, a computational fluid dynamics software package, and the GADGET cosmology application.

To learn more, check out the Student Cluster Competition Blog.