Responding to the required move to an all-digital experience, through our HPC-AI Advisory Council members and volunteer’s support, we not only led in introducing the virtual conference experience for 2020, the Council also hosted the first all-remote student cluster competitions. For the first time in the annual ISC-HPCAIAC SCC competition’s nine-year history, student teams competed using the same system, leaving performance entirely dependent on each team’s technical skills and knowledge. None of which could have been accomplished without the amazing support of NSCC Singapore for their generous allocation of system resources, and the ISC Group for their ongoing support of the annual student competition and our joint collaboration. We also extend a hearty congratulations to all the participating student teams for their hard work and resolve. We thoroughly enjoyed your participation. If you missed the award announcement you can check it out below:
Though the competition has just completed, we’ve already geared up for next year’s ISC 2021 Student Cluster Competition and are currently accepting team submissions through 06 November. Although every effort is being made to resume the onsite competition, the Council and the ISC Group will continue to monitor the global situation and adjust accordingly. In the meantime, we invite students from around the world to participate in the competition and look forward to announcing the final fourteen teams on 03 December. Register to join us for the live reveal and support the 2021 competitors and the community’s future experts!
The Council has also been extremely active in APAC. Our 8th Annual Student RDMA Programming Competition wrapped up in July with 20 teams participating throughout the region. The 3rd Annual HPC -AI Competition, with a record 30-teams participating, has been running since May and will complete in October. We’re looking forward to sharing the winning results live in March 2021 during the SupercomputingAsia 2021 conference in Singapore.
Our worldwide conference collaborations are continuing throughout the year. After the successful digital reformat of the annual Stanford conference, we’ll host two additional two-day virtual conferences, the Australia Conference (01-02 September) in collaboration with NCI and the UK Conference (13-14 October) in collaboration with STFC DiRAC. Registration for both conferences can be made today and is free. We look forward to bringing you more news on these in the coming weeks.
Lastly, we even delivered more digital capability for the entire community with the latest addition of “Iris”, the Council’s High-Performance Center’s newest open-access platform that is ready for requests. Thanks to the ongoing generosity of Dell EMC, experts can explore a host of HPC and AI interests on the new PowerEdge C6400 platform. The HDR InfiniBand-based cluster is a unique testbed to support a range of remote users and requests from standard benchmarking and application development to exploring advanced technologies and integration testing in addition to serving as a supplemental resource for researchers to complete critical complex works. Additional resources can be sourced through the HPC-Works space which includes guidelines for application installations, including required software, on HPC clusters along with numerous other openly accessible best practices.
Thanks to over 400 members committed to bridging high-performance computing and artificial intelligence use and potential, the HPC-AI Advisory Council is continuously evolving, even through challenging times, to ensure we’re bringing all of the beneficial capabilities and expertise needed to help support improved research, education, innovation and development. Not a member yet? Please join us!