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HPC & AI Wall StreetFRANKFURT, Germany, June 16 — E4 Computer Engineering is taking a highly active role in this year’s ISC High Performance conference by sponsoring two innovative teams competing in the Student Cluster Competition.
The challenge features small teams competing to demonstrate the capabilities of state-of-the-art high- performance cluster hardware and software. In the challenge, 12 teams of six undergraduate and/or high school students will build a small cluster based on their own designs on the ISC exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications. The greatest challenge will be getting their clusters to consume less than the 3120-watt power limit.
E4 Computer Engineering (ISC16 booth #914) will supply two clusters, consisting of 8 or 10 nodes equipped with dual socket Cavium ThunderX workload optimized processors, based on ARMv8-A- architecture and low-latency InfiniBand interconnection. The cluster for Thunderstruck (Universitat Politècnica de la Catalunya ISC16 booth #1452) will have a liquid cooling system, while the cluster for Boston Green (including members from MIT, Boston University, and Northeastern University working from booth #1362) exploits an air cooling system.
“We wanted to contribute to this challenge for a long time and this year we finally have the opportunity to support two teams with the low-power technology we have been working with since 2013,” said Piero Altoè, Marketing and BDM Manager at E4. “We are excited to see what the Boston Green and Thunderstruck students create with ARM-based clusters in an ‘uncontrolled’ environment such as SCC.”
“ARM technology is already being deployed in high-performance computing applications,” said Eric Van Hensbergen, distinguished engineer and director of HPC, ARM. “Our collaboration with E4 and the student teams is a great way of highlighting the advancing ARM ecosystem for HPC and developing innovative ideas to solve the challenges of delivering performance in a power-constrained environment.”
“The Thunderstruck team is glad to receive E4’s endorsement for this year’s challenge,” said Filippo Mantovani, Senior researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. “Thanks to the Mont-Blanc project, BSC has solid expertise in ARM-based technology prototype development, as well as an established collaboration with E4. Students are putting energy and passion into studying the applications and tuning them on E4’s platform, and I am looking forward to seeing the whole team on the field of ISC.”
“The advances in energy-efficient HPC design and optimization over the course of the last year or two is truly inspiring,” said Kurt Keville, Cluster Admin at M.I.T. “In a power-limited supercomputing competition, you must look for every opportunity in the OS and application stack to make improvements and the E4 solution with Cavium ThunderX offers our student programmers the chance to tune every aspect of the production codes and benchmarks.”
Held in collaboration between the HPC Advisory Council and ISC High Performance organizers, the Student Cluster Competition will begin on Monday June 20th and the winner will be announced on Wednesday June 22nd just before the end of the exhibition. People will be able to vote their favourite team starting from Monday 21 at 3pm at the following link: http://survey.gabrielconsultinggroup.com/limesurvey/index.php?sid=56469&lang=en
About E4 Computer Engineering
Established in 2002, E4 Computer Engineering designs and manufactures high performance systems which aim to accomplish both industrial and scientific research requirements and to reach a variety of customers ranging from universities to computing centers. E4’s focus is on HPC although our expertise extends to all segments of IT. Thanks to the established experience and the outstanding quality of our solutions, E4 Computer Engineering is acknowledged and appreciated as a valuable technology vendor by prestigious organizations like C.E.R.N.in Geneva. E4 designs each system individually to deliver highly personalized, cost effective and power saving solutions.
Source: E4 Computer Engineering
