The ultimate competition for student techies has begun. Well, the beginning step has: submissions for the 2011 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) are now open. The SCC is the ultimate challenge pitting student teams against hardware, software, electricity, heat, and each other. This year, the SCC committee is planning to invite eight teams to put it all on the line in Seattle, live at SC11.
At the Supercomputing Conference, teams from universities around the world build clusters that will run a set of HPC workloads and solve problems as quickly and accurately as possible. Equipment is borrowed from team sponsors, who will also help teams meet their other expenses, such as travel.
Sponsors and university faculty can also help teams learn what they need to know to put together a competitive system and optimize it for the workloads they’ll be running in the competition.
Student teams then bring their creations to the SC show and compete live on the show floor for all to see. They’re limited by the clock and a hard limit of 26 amps. Last year in New Orleans, it was a 48-hour marathon session of coding, debugging, monitoring, and finding the most comfy couches in vendor booths for catching a quick nap.
The teams turned in quite a performance last year, with three breaking through the TFLOP barrier for the first time in SCC history. Another team didn’t get their systems in time and was forced to throw together a cluster at the last minute on gear borrowed from other teams and vendors.
I covered the 2010 competition pretty heavily with team profiles, video blogs, and articles covering the results. (They should be listed at the bottom of this page if the Register linky things are working right.) This year, I’m going to cover the entire process from submission to team selection, benchmark announcements and, of course, the actual contest itself in Seattle.
There’s quite a bit of work that teams need to accomplish before showing up in Seattle. In addition to putting together a competitive system, they also have to carefully consider their approach to the various workloads and plan out how they’re going to attack them.
At the same time, they need to think about contingency plans to handle conditions outside of their control, like getting datasets that are different than anticipated or having hardware problems.
This is the fifth year for the SCC, and I found it to be a really compelling event. The ‘kids’ on these teams give up a huge amount of personal time to learn about and build HPC clusters. This is time that they could be using to play video games, text partial words and sentence fragments to each other, and generally get into trouble, so it’s quite a sacrifice.
If you’re interested in putting together a team and competing this year, you can find the application here. Clicking on the link will take you to the SC11 general registration site, so your first technical task is to establish an account and then navigate to the Student Cluster Competition entry form. The SCC committee can answer questions and even help set up your team with interested sponsors.
Team submissions are open from now until April 15th; winning submissions and invitations to Seattle will be announced in early May.