HPCwire: SC07 Holds First Cluster Challenge

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Features

November 23, 2007

SC07 Holds First Cluster Challenge

by Brent Gorda, SC07 Cluster Challenge Committee Chair

The SC07 Cluster Challenge was held in conjunction with the SC07 conference in Reno, Nevada. The event sought to create an exhibition and competition in which teams of undergraduate students would compete in a demonstration of talent, technology and accessibility of entry-level supercomputing. The activity was intended to highlight the gains in hardware performance, ease of use of clusters and the power and availability of simulation software.

To whet peoples' appetites, the Cluster Challenge Committee challenged that a half rack of a modern cluster would be competitive with the number one system on the TOP500 from only 10 years ago! In fact, the top Linpack score realized in the Challenge was 420 gigaflops, which would have made the TOP500 list only three years ago. This announcement was made during the TOP500 BoF session at SC07 and was met with loud cheers and applause from the attendees.

The rules of the Challenge were simple: a maximum of 26 amps max power (at 110 volts) were to be used, and no team member may have completed an undergraduate degree. Six teams and their vendor partners chose to compete:

Stony Brook University + Dell.
National Tsing Hua University + ASUSTek.
University of Colorado + Aspen Systems.
University of Alberta + SGI.
Indiana University + Apple.
Purdue University + HP.

Each team partnered with a vendor who loaned the equipment for the event and, in some cases, provided travel funds to the team. In most cases, the teams had access to the equipment for a few months, but some only had it for a few weeks prior to shipping. On Saturday, Nov. 10, teams arrived to find (or not, in some cases) their equipment waiting in the contest area. Saturday and Sunday were then spent rebuilding systems, optimizing power, and finalizing the benchmarks and applications for the start of the competition.

Teams were asked to run the HPC Challenge benchmarks at the beginning of the event at 8:00 PM on Monday. Once the results were submitted, teams were given access to data sets for the three previously announced applications: GAMESS, POP and POVRay. Teams then spent the remainder of their time -- up to 4:00 PM on Wednesday -- completing as many of the data sets as they could. At the end of the competition, judges interviewed the teams and awarded points based on this interaction. The judges were lead by Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee and ORNL) and included Dona Crawford (LLNL), Satoshi Matsuoka (Tokyo Tech) and Tim Lyons (Morgan Stanley).

For about 44 straight hours, teams worked on the benchmarks and applications in shifts. About halfway through the event, around Tuesday at noon, there was a general power interruption to the section of Reno where the convention center is located. All teams experienced a hard crash and had to scramble to recover. The event couldn't have asked for a more brutal real-life experience. Some of the teams lost upwards of ten hours of compute time and others lost hardware and time associated with debugging the failure. In the end, however, all teams were back online within a couple of hours and some chose to run with automatic checkpoint restart, as available in some of the applications, to protect against further interruption.

Ultimately, the winner of the contest was the team from The University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. While that team did not have the fastest system on paper, a combination of good preparation and good fortune during the brief power outage gave them the advantage.

The quality of teams, systems and computational work exceeded all expectations. While one could attribute this to individuals standing up to the challenge, the committee's opinion is that a larger force is also at work. This is that the entry barrier to supercomputing has dropped significantly. The results show that if you have a need for simulation computing, it is reasonable to believe that you can use local college or university talent and commonly available software and applications to get started on that work.

Another significant outcome of the event is its impact on the curricula of the participating institutions. Half of these schools decided to modify their undergraduate offerings in the future to include cluster and parallel computing classes.

Computational simulation, driven by continued advances in hardware, availability and maturity of cluster OS software, and enabled by parallel application software, has reached a point where it is clearly accessible and available. These tools are now available to industry and we predict the technology will soon be considered critical to enhance competitiveness of businesses of all sizes and in all markets.

In closing, there are numerous people and organizations to credit for the event itself. Starting with the ACM and IEEE (sponsors of SC07), the individual team vendor partners (Dell, ASUSTek, Aspen Systems, SGI, Apple and HP) and the event partners (Chevron, WesternGeco and Morgan). The results are exciting and we are already planning for the next event at SC08, Nov. 15-21, in Austin, Texas.

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html