Barnburner. Slugfest. Photo finish. Just a few cliches to let you know what’s coming up as we break down the finish of the 2022 Winter Classic Invitational Student Cluster Competition.

Twelve teams from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) battled for the Winter Classic championship from early February until the final judging interviews on April 14^th.

The unique structure of this virtual HPC competition had all student teams hosted by one of four mentor organizations in turn. The mentor orgs. allocated hardware and taught the students about the benchmark or application they’d be optimizing. It was a level playing field with all teams running on the same hardware configurations and receiving the same coaching from the mentors.

The mentor organizations and the competition challenges they hosted:

• HPE mentoring Linpack/HPCG
• Surprise HPC Pop Quiz given by competition organizers Intersect360 Research
• NASA Ames mentoring a subset of the NAS Parallel benchmarks
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory mentoring a machine learning challenge
• AWS mentoring the OpenFOAM Challenge
• BioTeam was our emergency HPC SWAT team, jumping in when needed to provide much needed help and guidance

All of challenges were worth 100 maximum points and the scores were normalized to the top team result. Including the capstone judges interview, student teams could earn a maximum total of 700 points for the competition.

The Battle

The competition opened with Linpack, always a crowd favorite. The scores were on the high side, with seven teams huddled at 88% or better. The Texas Tech Red Raiders pulled the top score with Tennessee State only 1.5% behind and UTEP following at third only 1.63% behind the winner.

Things got a lot more interesting with HPCG, however. Team Tennessee State shocked the field by reducing the HPCG problem set to the point where it entirely fit into system cache and notched a score that was 31% higher than second place Florida A&M (FAMU).

Their novel approach to the problem caused several conversations among the competition officials. Was reducing the problem size ‘fair game’ or not? In the final analysis, there wasn’t a rule against reducing the problem size, the team used the required four nodes, and they the problem for at least 30 minutes, so it was a kosher run and the score was put into the books.

The HPC Pop Quiz was added to the competition due to scheduling conflicts and also to just mess with the students. Why give them an additional week off if we don’t have to, right? The test featured 20 questions about HPC history, technology, and current events. We gave them study materials and to keep them from just searching up the answers, we timed the test, a fiendish twist. Each team member took the quiz individually and the longer they took on the test, the lower their score.

UTEP came out on top in this challenge, adding 100 points to their total, moving them from sixth place to a solid fourth. The TTU Red Raiders finished a very close second, grabbing 98.78 points, but Tennessee State was barely off the pace with 96.34 points. End result:  Tennessee State holds on to their first place position with the Red Raiders in second and FAMU a very close third.

Next up was NASA with a subset of their popular NAS Parallel benchmarks. Fayetteville State jumped out to an early lead with a top score on BT-MZ, but FAMU responded by pounding the field with their winning result on LU-MZ. However, Tennessee State made the SP-MZ benchmark their own and, by dint of their high finishes on the other runs, they won the overall NASA module by 1.82 points over FAMU and 4.5 points over the other team from Texas Tech, the Matadors. End result:  Tennessee State keeps the lead, FAMU moves into second, and the Red Raiders fall into third.

Oak Ridge National Lab throws a curve ball to the teams with their machine learning exercise. Students were running on ORNL’s Ascend cluster, which is the same configuration as Summit, albeit a tad smaller. This challenge was less about optimizing code and more about running ML routines and answering a series of tough questions.

Nearly all the teams were complete ML newbies, but they caught on quickly as the week progressed. Four teams took home the full 100 points on the ORNL module, UTEP, Tennessee State, Prairie View A&M, and the TTU Red Raiders. The Matadors, also from TTU, added 95 to their total with a close fourth place finish.

At the end of the ORNL module, Tennessee State holds onto a 50+ point lead, the Red Raiders regain second, UTEP moves up to third, and FAMU is holding fourth. Only 35 points separate second place and sixth place – things are very tight.

The AWS OpenFOAM Challenge changes everything

It was a deceptively simple proposition:  run an OpenFOAM model with a motorcycle and optimize your code while keeping the end result, the drag coefficient, within a narrow range. The students had to run their code on both an AMD-based and Intel-based cluster and run it 500 times to verify their model.

Like all of the mentors, AWS presented a mound of material on how to use the clusters, how to run OpenFOAM, and also provided live support during the week. Most all of the teams were up and running early and generating solid results.

But one team was generating better than ‘solid results.’ They knocked OpenFOAM out of the park and beat it like a rental car. Team Prairie View from Texas wasn’t just looking at compiler flags and MPI options. They went at the problem from another angle – looking to see how much they could coarsen the mesh and keep the required drag coefficient. This was the key to the kingdom, OpenFOAM-wise.

With this optimization, Prairie View turned in run times of 83 seconds on the AMD cluster and 64 seconds on the Intel cluster. The second-best result, from Tennessee State, was 563 seconds on AMD and 775 seconds on Intel. With score normalization to the top result, this meant that Prairie View gained 100 points while Tennessee State only took added a paltry 11.52 to their total. The other teams took home even smaller numbers of points, ranging from three to eight and change.

This scoring disparity had a shocking impact on the leaderboard. Prairie View vaulted from fifth place to second, only 2.21 points behind perennial leader Tennessee State. The third through sixth teams probably wouldn’t be able to catch either Prairie View or Tennessee, but they had their own battles to contend with. The scoring margin between sixth and third was a tight 36 points out of 600 total points possible to date.

The Last Chance

There’s only one event left. The judging interviews, worth a maximum of 100 points. These interviews will decide it all. We couldn’t have written a better script for the final week of the competition.

Interviews were conducted by the competition organizers joined by a panel of HPC experts from the mentor organizations. During their interview, student teams gave presentations discussing their trials, tribulations, and the results of their HPC benchmarking and optimization efforts.

The interviews were highly competitive and the teams all interview well. But with everything on the line, Team Prairie View aced out Team Tennessee State in the interview and won the Overall Championship by a narrow 30 points out of 700 possible. Wow.

Tennessee State finished second with the Texas Tech Red Raiders taking home third place. The rest of the field remained very close with UTEP holding fourth place, the Texas Tech Matadors grabbing fifth, and Florida A&M finishing sixth.

We closed out the 2022 competition last Friday with an online Gala Awards Ceremony. It featured an opening welcome by recent Turing Award winner Jack Dongarra and award announcements from industry players from HPE, NASA, Oak Ridge, AWS, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

In addition to announcing application results and the final standings, we also give out $30,000 in Brueckner Awards to competitors, which felt great.

You can see the Gala Awards Ceremony, in all its glory, in the video below:

But wait, there’s more! A lot more!

During the competition, we conducted multiple interviews with the teams and talked to the mentors and sponsors. Some of this content has been published, but not all of it. I’m taking the opportunity to clear the decks and make this story even longer. Yay!

Through our sponsors, we also gave students money to pay for team meals and we filmed bits and pieces of several of them. Much of this content consists of me making fun of their restaurant and food choices, with them giving as good as they got. The result is some great videos that give you a chance to get to know the students better and get a few laughs along the way.

One thing to watch for are the video shots I take at my broadcast partner, Addison Snell. If he’s not on the call with me, well, I let my imagination run wild with ideas of what he’s doing instead of sitting next to me interviewing students.

Here’s your bonus 2022 Winter Classic content….share it with your friends, families, and even enemies…

Guest Commentator Mike Woodacre:  Mike is an HPE Fellow and the company’s CTO of HPC and MCS. In the interview, he talks about how the competition strikes a chord with him because he’s the first one in his family to complete his education. We also talk about the current competition standings and what’s ahead for the teams.

Bonus Team Interviews:

Team Morehouse Update:  Our first interview with Morehouse was a corrupted file fiasco, but we finally caught up with them and gave them a proper interview. The team has a couple of chess players who, strangely enough, have never played each other. I try to stir the pot to get a rivalry going between them.

Team Fullerton Update: The Cal State Fullerton team has had its ups and downs in the competition. Self-admitted complete newbies to HPC, the team has seen better performance as they progress through the program. After this interview, they nailed a third place position on part of the AWS OpenFOAM Challenge – nice work.

Team Fayetteville Update:  This is another team that has gotten stronger as the competition went on. The team, featuring the youngest player, a high school senior, is a great mix of experience – but none of them has gone down the HPC road prior to the Winter Classic. In the interview, they talk about what they’ve learned and their career aspirations.

Team Ekhos Engineers Update:  This is either the first or second team from California’s Channel Island State University depending on which team you ask. In the interview we talk about, not surprisingly, the competition and what they’ve learned. As Alex said “it felt like organized chaos…” describing the experience with the competition. Loved that description!

Team Don’t Panic Update:  The other team from Channel Island State University. We catch up to them just after the ORNL ML challenge. They were a little wrung out, having contended with the fiendish ORNL test. This team is always fun to interview, with a great sense of humor. The team is sitting in eighth place when we’re talking to them and ended up finishing the competition in eighth.

Texas Tech Red Raider Update:  In this interview we talk with the Red Raiders about the just completed Oak Ridge machine learning challenge. ML was very new to this set of students, like all of the other teams, and it took them a goodly amount of time to get up on the task. The team is sitting in second place when this interview took place. What I love about this team is their bravado, with Michael Beebe calling out Tennessee State by name “we’re coming for your Tennessee!” Gotta love that, it’s a lot of fun.

Prairie View Update:  We talk to Team Prairie View just after we received results from the ORNL machine learning task. The team doesn’t know, until this call, that they were one of the four teams who scored 100% on this module. It’s fun to drag out the news a bit, but take a look at their reaction when I finally drop the results on them (1:50 in the video). Very solid team in several ways, they worked cooperatively on all of the challenges as a team, trained very hard on each challenge, used the mentor training effectively, and asked questions when they got stuck. Extremely impressive performance by your 2022 Winter Classic Champion, Team Prairie View.

Texas Tech Matador Update:  This was a very consistent team, typically nailing down fourth or fifth place in every task. Through talking with them, you can see that they’re improving and growing stronger as the competition marches on. During this call, I gave them their Oak Ridge results (95%), which pleased them despite the fact that four teams scored 100% on this task. We explored student career aspirations, with most of the students already having their immediate futures mapped out with internships, school, or full-time positions in areas as diverse as automotive and financial services. I prove once again that my short-term memory is shot as I mix them up with students from the other TTU team.

Team UTEP Update:  UTEP was the last team we interviewed in the competition. We caught up with them on the Saturday they turned in their AWS OpenFOAM results. This was the last computational task in the competition you could tell that the team was basking in the afterglow of turning in their final results. The team feels that they put everything into the competition and didn’t leave anything in the locker room (no, they don’t have a student cluster competition locker room).  Very solid team, highly impressive.

Meal Nights

We built the “meal night” feature into the competition to give us a vehicle to get to know the teams better and give them more exposure. Our generous Platinum/Gold level sponsors provided the money, the team managers handled the logistics, and we dipped into their meals to say hi and then, for me anyway, to rate their food choices.

Texas Tech Matadors/Red Raiders Meal Night #1:  this was pretty cool, the team manager, the Mighty Misha Ahmadian, got both teams together not once, but twice for meals events. Their first bread-breaking took place at the “One Guy From Italy” Italian restaurant in Lubbock, TX.

What really made me smile was obvious it was that the teams were having a good time together. During this first meal, I shared the ORNL final results with them, which were pretty good. The Matadors scored 95% and the Red Raiders took home a perfect 100%. During the video, I passed judgement on their meal choices in an even-handed way, handing out plaudits for the meat-oriented selections and expressing doubt about a buffalo cheese and chicken pizza and Margharita pizza selection.

Texas Tech Matadors/Red Raiders Dinner – the Sequel:  In the second video, we find the team at “Torchy’s Tacos”, another fine Lubbock institution. This place has a hilarious menu, including entries dubbed “Trailer Park”, “Tipsy Chick”, “Tokyo Drifter”, and the ever popular “MoFaux.” With the Trailer Park taco, there’s a “Make it Trashy” option that substitutes queso for lettuce. The team and I bantered about their meals, the competition standings, and what was coming up in a fun filled video. Check it out.

Team UTEP:   It’s rib night for UTEP and I’m highly supportive of that choice – big fan of ribs. They have some good news to accompany their meaty feast:  at the time of filming, they were one of the four teams that maxed out the ORNL ML challenge and it has moved them into third place overall. It’s fun to see their smiles when they hear the news. The Winter Classic is a big deal to this team and it shows.

During the meal, we lapse into a technical discussion of the various competition tasks and the team really impresses me with their thoughtful analysis and solutions to technical problems.

One of the students express some doubt as to whether they know enough to enter into HPC as an intern. They’ve just spent nearly 10 weeks successfully working on real-world HPC tasks on four different supercomputers – on their own time! Qualified? Absolutely. These students have learned a LOT during this competition and would be great hires for any HPC organization.

Team Fayetteville:  It’s a Greek lunch for Team Fayetteville in the fashionable Greek District of Fayetteville, NC. (Full disclosure: I have no evidence to support the claim that there’s a Greek District in Fayetteville or that it’s fashionable.) The team is together and having a good time as they share a Greek pizza slathered with cheese and chicken – it looks pretty good.

Although it might not show in the leaderboard, Team Fayetteville is one of the teams that has come the farthest during the competition. In the first events, I had the sense that the team was struggling just to get the apps to run, much less able to optimize them. But they worked with our HPC Seal Team Six BioTeam before the NASA NAS Par benchmarks and it really paid off – Fayetteville had the highest score on one the BT-MZ section of the module. They also nailed a forth place finish on both the AMD and Intel portions of the AWS OpenFOAM Challenge. Nice work, Fayetteville!

Team CISU Don’t Panic:  Pizza and ice cream are on the menu for Team Don’t Panic from Channel Islands State University. This team is one of the most fun to interview, always happy and upbeat with a great sense of humor. I highly approve of their “Meatinator” protein-packed pizza choice and pounding it down with ice cream. However, they opted for plain vanilla without any toppings, which caused me a little concern.

During the interview we have some great banter back and forth. Team member Isaac plied me with questions about myself (my favorite topic), showing that he has done some research on me, at least where it pertains to my airline choices and TV favorites. Fun interview.

Team Morehouse-Spelman:  They satisfied their Mexican food craving at an Atlanta area joint called The Bone Garden Catina, excellent choice. During the interview we talked about what the team has learned during the competition, which is a lot, according to them. We also talked about their future in terms of career interests. One of the students has already accepted an offer from Google, but the others are still weighing options and looking at alternatives. Hire them, they’re solid.

Team Prairie View:  It’s Italian night in Prairie View, TX, and the team is eating in with a huge feast from Olive Garden. Ok, I make fun of Olive Garden a bit in the video, but I don’t think there’s an authentic Little Italy in Prairie View, so you take what you get and enjoy it.

We have a nice conversation about the competition and their progress so far. It’s just before the AWS OpenFOAM Challenge, the module that Prairie View used to make their move to the championship. Right now, they have no idea that they’re going to stun the competition with their incredible OpenFOAM results. Kind of fun to look back on it. This is a team that worked hard, and, more importantly, worked together to get the most out of the competition. I’ve been very impressed with them.

Oh, and I also give out my recipe for killer Fettuccine Alfredo and Crab Alfredo in the crawl, it’s quick, easy, and delicious. Give it a try and get back to me.

Team Tennessee State:  They selected Whole Foods for their first meal. I have a hard time with that given my entire life devoted to unhealthy eating. Well, the pretentious smugness of Whole Foods factors in as well. Ahmed is definitely throwing this in my face with his meal order of a handful of kale. But I have power past my revulsion and move on with the interview, despite the great personal cost to myself.

During the chat, we discuss the current standings, Tennessee State is about 50-60 points ahead of the field at this point with another 200 points yet to be awarded. We also talk about their competition future – they still have AWS and the judges interview ahead of them, and we discuss what the judges are looking for. Food aside, it’s a good conversation with a team destined for 2022 Winter Classic greatness.

 

Finally, the Summary!

For the seven of you who have read this far in the story, congratulations and thank you, that’s quite a feat and you should be proud of yourselves.

Putting on this competition has been an eight-month marathon, but a labor of love. The 2022 Winter Classic was much bigger and better than our first competition last year. We changed up the entire cluster competition architecture and installed a new one that gave the students a highly improved education, more experience with more real-world applications and supercomputers, and also gave them a level competition playing field.

None of this would have happened without our sponsors. We’re a small company and couldn’t have pulled this off on our own, so we owe a huge thank you to our sponsors:

• Platinum:  Intel, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Penguin Solutions
• Gold:  HPE
• Silver:  Lenovo
• Bronze and Championship Award:  Microsoft Azure

The mentor organizations filled a critical role in the competition. They didn’t just host clusters for all 12 teams, they also provided hours (and hours) of training and support. The students learned so much from this experience and they now have the training and experience to land an internship or full-time job anywhere in our industry. This is a life changing event for many of our student competitors.

We also have to thank the universities and students who participated in the competition – they’re the most important part of this whole thing, right? Thank them by supporting them. Take a look at the videos, think about how they’d fit into your organization, and reach out to use if you’d like to take the next step and get a look at their resumes.

You’ll see more cluster competition coverage from Intersect360 Research soon, starting with the upcoming 2022 ISC virtual/on-premises competition. We’ll also look at the postponed ASC event when it happens later this year, and then the SC competition in November. By then, we’ll be talking about the 2023 Winter Classic….phew….stay tuned.

In case you missed it:

OpenFOAM Results Shock Competition

2022 Winter Classic – Oak Ridge Results Revealed!

Double Episode Fun Pack:  NASA and Oracle

NASA Results are In!

HPE Shocks Competition – In a Good Way

2022 Winter Classic:  Meet the Teams

HPC Pop Quiz Roils Cluster Comp Leaderboard

HPE Mentors 2022 Winter Classic Field

2022 Winter Classic: First Results Are In!

2022 Winter Classic: Who’s In?!

2022 Winter Classic Cluster Competition is ON!