The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
November 20, 2008
2008 Cluster Challenge A Success
AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 20 -- The SC08 Cluster Challenge event in Austin, Texas, was an unmitigated success, that was full of roller coaster rides in computer computation for all of the students involved.
The challenge is based on a university team made up of 6 student and an adviser. The teams work with hardware vendors to optimize their hardware to work under 26AMPS of power. Their main goal is to get their hardware to run the best with the provided scientific applications.
The teams that took part in the Cluster Challenge this year are: Purdue University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, University of Colorado, National Tsing-Hua University (Taiwan), University of Alberta (Canada), and the team comprised of Indiana University and Technische University Dresden.
On Monday, the teams started at 8am to run the HPCC portion of the challenge. This ended at 4pm with the National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan with a score of 703GFLOPS. Purdue University took the overall highest score to dominate the HPCC part of the challenge.
In the overall competition, involving the scientific applications of WPP, OpenFOAM, RAXML, POY, and GAMESS, all of the teams worked extremely hard for 44 hours straight. This required the students to work in shifts around the clock, keeping fueled by chips, soda and pizza. Several of the students were found to be sleeping in their booths and under tables on more than one occasion. At the close of the competition, the students were interviewed by a panel of expert computational scientists. This league of distinguished judges was headed up by Jake Dongarra from University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
After all the points were awarded to each team, the overall winner of the Cluster Challenge for SuperComputing 2008 was the combined team of the University of Indiana and Technische Universitat Dresden.
The Purdue University Team received the an award for the most power efficiency usage during the competition.
The University of Colorado received an award for the best "Cluster Challenge Spirit" for their team work and effort to compete in the challenge despite all of the obstacles the team came across during the hours of the competition.
We wish to thank our sponsors for all of their help in making the challenge a great success: Western Geco, Morgan Stanley, and Chevron and the SuperComputing organization.
We also wish to thank the vendors who contributed their time and expertise to the students before the competition and on the show floor: SciCortex, SGI, IBM, HP, Cray, Aspen Systems, Dell and Direct Data Networks.
-----
Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Article Tools
Share Options
(Digg, Technorati, more)
Subscribe
Sponsored Links
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
Feature Articles
TeraGrid '09: Student Participation Soars
There was a new energy at this year's TeraGrid '09 conference thanks to an outstanding turnout for the student program. Thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, more than 100 high school, undergraduate and graduate students were able to participate in the conference.
Read More...
TeraGrid '09: OSG and TeraGrid Collaboration
Paul Avery, a recognized leader in advanced grid and networking for science, delivered the first keynote address at the recent TeraGrid '09 conference in Arlington, Virginia. A professor of physics at the University of Florida, Avery is co-principal investigator and founding member of the Open Science Grid (OSG). Avery talked about the history of OSG, some of the projects that leverage its resources, and OSG's relationship with TeraGrid.
Read More...
TeraGrid '09: Thriving in an Exponentially Changing World
Before he even took the podium, Ed Seidel was one of the buzz makers at the TeraGrid '09 conference. The day before his keynote, it was announced that he was stepping in as acting assistant director of the National Science Foundation's math and physical sciences directorate. For his talk at the conference, however, Seidel focused on the issues and efforts within his home at NSF, the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.
Read More...
Top Headlines
3D Seismic Data: Taking a Smarter Approach to Interpretation
Jul 09 | Engineer Live | The demand for computational tools to underpin the 3D seismic interpretation process has never been more apparent. Read more...
Engineering Unemployment Soared in 2Q to 8.6%
Jul 08 | EE Times | Unemployment for U.S. engineers has reached record levels, according to government figures. Read more...
Gartner Adjusts 2009 IT Spend Downward Again
Jul 08 | Network World | Global spending for 2009 projected to drop 6 percent, for a total of $3.2 trillion. Read more...
Concurrent and Parallel Are Not The Same
Jul 08 | Linux Magazine | Portability or efficiency? Neither is guaranteed when writing explicit parallel code. Read more...
800 TFLOP Real-Time Ray Tracing GPU Unveiled, Not for Gamers
Jul 07 | Ars Technica | Japanese company builds custom ASIC to accelerate real-time ray traced rendering for the auto industry. Read more...
Featured Whitepapers
Building High Performance Computing in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block
Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.
Multimedia
Webcast: Dell Expands HPC Access and Adoption with Intel Cluster Ready Program
Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell
Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.
Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution
BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.
Webcast: HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio & Sun HPC ClusterTools
Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.
Newsletters
Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.
HPC Job Bank
-
HPC Systems Administrator
McGill University -
High Performance Computing Data Center Manager
National Renewable Energy Laboratory -
High Performance Computing Systems Administrator
Idaho National Laboratory -
Solution Engineer- HPC
Dell Inc -
Parallel Programmer
Cardiff University -
Principal Software Research Engineer
Indiana University -
Post Doctoral Researcher - Exascale Stream Computing
IBM - Visit the HPCwire Job Bank
Featured Events
-
July 13-16, 2009
WORLDCOMP'09
Las Vegas , NV
USA
-
August 24-28, 2009
Data Mining: Levels I, II, & III
Denver , CO
USA