Cluster Comp Coach Chat

By Dan Olds

June 23, 2020

In our continuing effort to provide the most comprehensive ISC20 Student Cluster Competition coverage possible, we’ve interviewed coaches from several of the teams in order to get their perspective on the challenges arising from having to advise a team remotely. In these brief interviews, the coaches open up and give us a glimpse of what it’s like to mentor these students through one of the most grueling cluster competitions yet.


Team CHPC: Coaches David Macleod and Nyameko Lisa give us a look behind the scenes on the South African front. According to them, the secret behind Team CHPC’s success can be boiled down to one word: preparation. They discuss how they take about a year to mold and train each team. David also shares his technique for ‘reading the board’ when it comes to power consumption and estimating how other teams are faring vs. his team. Highly interesting stuff.

 

Team EPCC:  Coaches Xu Guo and Juan Rogriguez Herrera join me for another edition of “Coach Chat” on the second day of the competition. Coach Xu has been the long-time head coach of Team EPCC with Juan assisting for the past two competitions. The coaches discussed how communication between the team and the coaches has been a big challenge in this virtual (and quarantined) event. We also talked about the challenges arising from each team using the same cluster and how this might impact the scores. One thing that they and their team really miss is the interaction with the other teams and coaches that you get from a live competition.

 

Team Hamburg:  Michael Kuhn and Jannek Squar take a few minutes for a quick interview. Michael has coached the team for the last six years with Jannek joining the roster for the last three competitions. Like the other teams, Hamburg would much rather have a big cluster of their own, but they’re making the best of the ‘one cluster for all’ situation. One of the problems facing Hamburg is team turnover, having to start over with new students as former students graduate and go professional. My suggestion that they tell students to eschew formal education and just go pro in clusters falls flat. We finish up by talking about their advice for cluster competition coaches – primarily, the importance of having a solid team captain.

 

Team ETH Zurich:  Assistant coach Hussein Harake takes a few minutes to discuss how Team ETH has been coping with the virtual competition. Their team is fortunate in that every member has participated in the ISC19 and SC19 cluster competitions. This experience helps as it lets them know what to expect and how to handle the pressure. We discuss the team’s experience at SC and how they had to scramble to find misdelivered rack at the last minute.

 

Team Heidelberg:  We have Askel Alpay on video and Sabine Richling on audio only – ah, the joys of using Zoom, right? The Heidelberg team has mixed levels of big-time cluster competition experience, along with being at different points in their formal education. The coaches also discuss the wide range of HPC-related courses available at Heidelberg, I was pretty surprised at the sophistication and depth of their curriculum.

 

Team Tsinghua:  Jidong Zhai and Wentao Han are the coaches of the most successful Student Cluster Competition in history. They have both been guiding the team for the last five years with nary a stumble in the rankings. Their team this year is a mixture of experienced competitors with more new players than typical. We talk about Tsinghua’s secret sauce – why do they keep winning? My theory is that they have a better ability to control their power than most other teams with deeper knowledge of the systems. But that doesn’t matter this year, since power control doesn’t matter. I ask the question “do you have any secrets on how to beat Tsinghua in a competition.” They respond that practice and preparation are the keys to winning. Typically, Tsinghua spends a lot of time preparing for a competition, usually starting when the applications for the next competition is released. But you have to consider that this team competes in every competition, so they gain a lot of practice and experience on the field of play.

 

Team Warsaw:  We met with team coaches Maciej Szpindler and Marcin Semeniuk and talk about how their students are disappointed in not getting the full Student Cluster Competition experience this year. Without a physical competition, the students don’t get a feeling for how they’re doing and can’t pick up knowledge from the other competitors. Compounding this isolation is that the Warsaw students are also loaded down with final exams and other academic tasks. I also gave these coaches the idea that they should tell their students to no show their final exams, give up on formal academics, and just concentrate on winning ISC20. They didn’t buy it either.

 

Team UPC:  This is the largest coaching contingent I have ever seen in a Student Cluster Competition. Fully six coaches devoted to the six student UPC team. What is wonderful to see is that four out of the six mentors were former Student Cluster Competition participants with Team UPC. In the video we get to meet each of the coaches and discuss how the teams had to shift at the last minute from a system based on their beloved Arm processor to an x86 box located in Singapore. Not an enviable position, but the feeling I get from this team and their coaches is that they have the team cohesion to overcome nearly any challenge – it’s a very close knit group.

 

Interviewing the coaches has pulled back the veil and given us a glimpse into what it takes to build and mentor a Student Cluster Competition team, particularly in these isolated, virus-ridden, times. It’s a difficult job, but they’ve pulled it off. They deserve kudos and recognition for what they’ve given to these teams and to the millions (and millions) of Student Cluster Competition aficionados worldwide.

Stay tuned for more ISC20 Student Cluster competition updates!

 

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire