The last day of the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) at SC12 in Salt Lake City brought a range of emotions and activities. The one common denominator: Everyone was waiting. The final results had been turned in the night before, and there was nothing left to do but wait for the awards ceremony, when each participant would hear the name of his/her team called… or not.

‘Read more’ for videos and the students’ final thoughts, and raise your coffee mug (or Red Bull can) in salute to their months of hard work and dedication.

Team Taiwan: Push to the Finish; Confidence with a side order of giggling

I’ve covered Taiwan’s NTHU (National Tsing Hua University) team for three years now. And every time I talk to them they’re personable, friendly, and modest. Very modest. Too modest. This is a team with a serious pedigree that’s backed up by the best track record in the game.

First, they’re from the high tech district of Taiwan – almost sharing parking lots with some of the most advanced tech manufacturers in the world. They’ve proven their skills in previous competitions, winning the highest LINPACK score in the early years and taking home the Overall Award in 2010 and 2011. Team Taiwan is the first repeat winner of the SCC and the first team to have a chance to three-peat. Bottom line? They’re formidable.

But when I wander by their booth to get their thoughts on their chances? They smile shyly and give the impression that not only do they believe they can’t win, they think they’ll be lucky even to stay competitive with the other teams. I’ve finally started calling them on this attitude and pointing out how it’s increasingly at odds with history. You can’t be the underdog after you’ve won first prize two years in a row, right?

So what do they say now, on the last day of the SC12 competition? I was surprised when they expressed confidence in their chances of notching their third Overall Award prize. While this is out of character, it reflects reality. They know what they’re doing, they’re one of the most experienced and knowledgeable teams in the competition, and they’ve won the whole enchilada two times running. So why shouldn’t they believe they can do it again?

 

Team Venus: Finishing Strong; A mix of ‘strong’ and ‘struggling’ on scientific apps

This is not only the first cluster competition for the team from the University of the Pacific, but also the first time any of the students have done anything at all HPC-related.

Under the mentorship of Oak Ridge National Lab and their hardware sponsor Appro, the team gave it their best against much more experienced competitors. They posted a respectable 2.33 Teraflop/s LINPACK, which was good enough to put them into fourth place going into the application round of the competition.

On the scientific apps, Team Venus was, as they put it, “Either strong or struggling.” While they all have computer science backgrounds, they don’t have much (if any) experience in running large-scale scientific research applications. But they persevered and busily worked to get their ‘struggle’ apps functioning at a reasonable level.

Team Venus is also noteworthy because it’s the first all-female team to compete in an SCC. This attracted a lot of attention and helped shine a brighter light on women in STEM fields, and on the cluster competition in general.

But they aren’t the first female competitors. Over the years, many teams have had female members and coaches. The Asian teams have had several females on their teams, and Team Taiwan’s player/spokesperson is usually a female. Team Russia (2010 and 2011) had a female coach and female team members, and teams at the ISC’12 SCC also sported women competitors.

Although HPC and computing in general is predominantly made up of humans of the male persuasion, it’s a mistake to say that it’s completely male-dominated these days. There are many women engineers, researchers, and scientists. The male-female ratio isn’t 50-50, but it’s not 90-10 either, and over time it continues to change.

Aside from Team Venus, I think there were four or five women on the SCC teams this year – about the same number as in 2011 and 2010. I don’t have accurate stats on female participation because it’s not something I’ve been tracking; my coverage focuses on team and individual personalities, what they’ve built, and how they deal with the challenges presented by the competition. To me, that’s the interesting stuff. And Team Venus, regardless of gender, was an interesting team to observe and definitely added some personality to the 2012 SCC.

 

Team Boilermaker: Hammering Code, Not Booze; Moving to hybrid HPC next time?

Although the Boilermakers visited several of the vendor parties the night before, they assert in the video below that they didn’t overindulge, and claim that the absence of some team members is due to meetings, not hangovers. I think I buy that explanation; the Purdue teams take a businesslike approach to their cluster battling.

The real news in this video is that the mighty Purdue, the most traditional of the Big Iron cluster competitors, might be considering going the hybrid route with their next system. In the vid, we bat around various possibilities, with the team mostly talking about Intel Phi (which keeps them mostly traditional). I raise the possibility of FPGAs and how they might light a serious fire under the Purdue boiler.

One interesting thing about the Purdue approach to the SCC is that it’s not just fielding a team and seeing what happens. They’ve used the competition to build up a curriculum in advanced HPC topics and to attract students to the program.

Many former Purdue SCC team members are now working professionally in the industry in HPC-related positions – which is sort of the point of this whole thing anyway, right? It’s all about what students learn and what they do with that education. And if participating in the SCC helps Purdue (and other participating institutions too) are mint more highly skilled and motivated folks who are ready to push out the boundaries of research and computing, then that’s a great end result. See you next year, Purdue… and bring some accelerators, okay? I want to see what you can do with them.

 

Team USTC: Clustering, the Universal Language; Valiant attempt to talk to coffee-addled analyst

Here’s a short look at what the team from China’s University of Science & Technology was up to on the last day of the competition. There’s a pretty big language barrier here – one that’s made worse by my inability to speak slowly and clearly after drinking a quart of press room coffee.

(A note/rant to all those who run press rooms: stop using those stupid single-cup ‘pod’ coffee makers. But if you absolutely insist upon them, make sure you have enough REAL COFFEE on hand. Not ‘Pumpkin-Infused Cappuccino’ or  ‘Hazelnut Broccoli Blend’ or ‘Blueberry Beef Celebration’. End of rant.)

Although we didn’t share a common spoken language, it was easy to see that these kids are confident in both their hardware and their ability to make it sing. Like all of the teams we’ve previously seen from China, they’re big believers in hybrid HPC, and their weapon of choice is six NVIDIA Tesla 2090 cards. They’re power-hungry at 225 watts each, but they can crank out as much as 10x the performance of a traditional CPU – a bargain from a power consumption standpoint.

Team USTC is new to the competition, so they’re difficult to handicap, but given the scores posted by previous teams hailing from the Middle Kingdom (NUDT and Beijing’s Tsing Hua), I think they have to be considered a serious contender for the Overall Award.

 

Team Boston: No Boston Massacre in SLC; Safe and sane fun on last night of competition

Early on the last day of the SC12 Student Cluster Competition I hit a couple of morning meetings and then went wandering around the competition area. Most of the teams had at least two or three reps in the booths monitoring the systems and just sort of hanging around. They had turned in their final scientific results the night before, so all that was left to do was wait for the results and then tear down their systems in preparation for the trip back home.

Team Chowdah (aka Team Boston, aka Team Mass Green) had a single team member in their booth. Fortunately, it was one of the identical twins, meaning that when you take into account creepy twin parallelism, the booth was really being manned by 1.5 or maybe 1.8 team members. (I’m not sure how well they scale, particularly when separated by distance. Team advisor Dan said that they had run some tests, but he didn’t have the data with him.)

My first thought was that Team Chowdah had hit all of the vendor parties and, in typical Boston style, ended up in drunken fights, or getting arrested, or both. I was assured that even though the team did hit several (many) of the vendor parties, cooler heads prevailed and everyone had a lot of safe and sane fun. We talked about the competition, future ideas for systems, and how we can crank up the pressure on competitors. My idea? Put each team on a large pallet and suspend it from the rafters at the beginning of the competition. As each team completes tasks, its platform is gradually lowered until it reaches the floor. Maybe it could be a new “Thunderdome Division” of the SCC?

 

Team Taiwan: LINPACK Is Enough; “Meh” to total cluster supremacy

Team NUDT (China’s own National University of Defense Technology) was all smiles when I stopped by their booth. And what’s not to smile about? They had just won the LINPACK award with their record-breaking 3 Teraflop/s score and were considered a serious contender for the overall award.

We discussed their LINPACK achievement, and they showed me the plaque (it’s a nice plaque). Then the conversation turned to how they thought they’d do on the scientific applications that make up the bulk of the scoring for the overall award. Their overall reaction to this question? Despite the language barrier, it was a clear “Meh.”

After talking to the team and seeing some of the final results, I’m pretty sure that the NUDT team was putting all of their chips on LINPACK. And, assuming they could dominate this category, they’d walk away happy.  One of the telling factors is their HPCC score. HPCC is a set of seven HPC tests and includes LINPACK. The NUDT HPCC score wasn’t anything you’d write home to Mom about – or even send a text message, for that matter.

So it looks like Team NUDT went all-out on the independent LINPACK run (the one they submitted for the award) and called it good enough for SC12. But breaking through the 3 Teraflop/s barrier isn’t anything to sniff at, and they should be congratulated for hitting that mark. But I’d like to see them go all-out on all aspects of the competition – not just the drag race portion.

 

Team Longhorn: The Wait

I caught up with the team from UT Austin just before they turned in their final results. As you can see in the short video, they’re pretty cool and composed, but I thought I sensed a little bit of anxiety under the surface. As it turns out, they should have been more relaxed – they were on their way to winning the 2012 Overall Award.

This is Team Longhorn’s third year in the competition, and they seemed more focused and businesslike than before. At their first outing at SC10 in New Orleans, the Longhorn booth was festooned with posters and flair highlighting their “TACC to the Future” theme. In 2011, their Seattle booth was dominated by their mineral oil immersion cooling solution. (They had some sort of theme that year too, but it wasn’t memorable enough to stick with me, and I’m too lazy to look it up in my voluminous archives.)

The Longhorn effort this year had no theme, few (if any) team giveaways, and a stark booth. They didn’t seem like the outgoing and fun-loving bunch we’ve seen at past competitions. Of course, it could be that they were sick of me hanging around – which is certainly understandable (and not the first time I’ve heard this, or even the first time I’ve heard this today).

Team Texas was on a mission, and highly focused on winning all the marbles. And they accomplished this goal, bringing the coveted SCC Overall Award to Texas for the first time ever. They also broke with tradition Longhorn tradition by bringing a hybrid system (CPU + GPUs) to the big dance. Their new box and renewed focus paid off with a big win for the Longhorns.

 

Team Red Raider: Down, but never out

And finally, a special shout-out to the team from Texas Tech University. They had almost everything they needed to win it all:

• Bright, personable students – check
• Completely unique immersion cooling system they built themselves out of marine and auto parts – check
• System – uh, no…

Sadly, their system didn’t ship on time, and in fact never even made it into the U.S. But all was not lost. In true Student Cluster Competition tradition, other teams (U of Texas and Purdue) gave Texas Tech some spare servers, and vendor partners Dell and Mellanox scoured the show floor to get even more gear to the Red Raider team.

They worked with what they had in the face of insurmountable odds and remained enthusiastic about the competition, and the opportunity to just be there. They could not have been more impressive.