This article is more than 1 year old

Cluster-grappling kids clash: Battle of the Big Iron in the Big Easy

Bring your HPC weapons to the Mississippi

Here are the teams

Team Taiwan (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan) looks to have the biggest cluster overall with 240 CPU cores, 10 NVIDIA K40 GPUs, and a massive 2.5TB of memory. Is it possible to run this whole configuration at full speed and stay anywhere near the 3,000 watt power cap? No way.

But the team knows this and is counting heavily on their skill at throttling down their CPUs or GPUs to maximise performance while staying under the power limit.

This isn’t Team Taiwan’s first cluster rodeo. It's competed in seven prior competitions, including bouts at the Asian student cluster competition, along with previous SC events.

Over the years it's taken home two Overall Championships plus two Highest LINPACK awards. Given its impressive configuration and equally impressive competition track record, Team Taiwan has earned its status as an elite student cluster team.

Team Aussie (iVEC, Australia) is another heavy-weight competitor at SC14. Its eight-node configuration contains 256 CPU cores, eight Tesla K40 GPUs, and a big old terabyte of memory. In past competitions, teams have tended to spread their GPUs out evenly among their compute nodes.

This year we’re seeing more teams concentrate these accelerators on fewer nodes, so that when the GPUs aren’t needed, more of the overall configuration can be idled to save precious power.

This is the second time the Aussies have travelled to America to test their cluster prowess against the rest of the world. In its rookie year, at SC13 in Denver, the team finished in the middle of the pack. The 2014 edition of Team Aussie has an entirely new set of students, but still has the same coach, which has definitely helped the team take advantage of lessons learned from its previous attempt.

If there were a category for the team that brings the greatest number of stuffed animal mascots, Team Aussie would have won that award twice over. Unfortunately, this isn’t a prize-winning category this year, although it has been proposed (by me) for SC15.

Team Longhorn (University of Texas, Austin) has the opportunity to make Student Cluster Competition history by becoming the first team to ‘three-peat’ as SC cluster champion. Only one other team, NTHU from Taiwan, has ever had this chance, and it came just short of the goal at SC12 in Salt Lake City.

The Texas system this year is a departure from its 2013 and 2012 winning systems. In those systems, the Longhorns went with a mix of CPUs and GPUs, running four Teslas in 2013. But its 2014 box is total old school with 18 E5-2698v3 16-core processors backed up by almost a terabyte of memory. No fuel injection, turbocharging, or any other fancy stuff.

With this move, it essentially gave up on winning the LINPACK award in hopes that its traditional box would be able to outperform the hybrids on the scientific applications. Given its skills, experience, and backing from TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center) and sponsor Dell, Team Longhorn has to be considered one of the favourites to win the SC14 Overall Championship. But making the hat-trick is never easy.

Team Mass Green (MIT, Harvard, Northeastern University, and Boston University) has had a busy year of student cluster competitions. Fresh off its appearance at ISC14 in Leipzig, Team Chowder has once again jumped into the SC cluster competition fray. This is the fifth time a Mass Green team has competed in a major event, which is pretty cool.

As usual, the Beantowners are bringing a whole lot of gear. Its 2014 dreadnought has eight nodes, each with dual 10-core E5-2680v3 CPUs running at 2.8GHz. For deck guns, it has eight NVIDIA K40m (passively cooled) GPUs, which will give them additional processing punch for LINPACK and some of the scientific applications.

While its system is pretty conventional this year, Team Mass Green doesn’t shy away from experimentation. It was the first team to try fat quad-socket nodes in a cluster competition (ISC14). This wasn’t successful, but was worth the attempt.

On the creepier side, Mass Green was the first (and only) team that used identical twin team members in an attempt to harness their natural biological link to attain higher cluster performance.

Team HUST (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China) is another veteran team. SC14 marks its fourth major cluster competition. It parleyed a second place finish at China’s first ASC competition in 2013 to win a berth at ISC13 in Leipzig, where it won the LINPACK award with a (then) recording setting 8.455 TFlop score.

Its exact configuration in the table above is based on my interview with the team and observations based on what it's run before. In all the hubbub surrounding SC14, somehow the HUST final detailed architectural proposal wasn’t received by the committee.

However, we do know enough to place HUST into the heavyweight class. Its eight node, 224 core, box is definitely one of the largest clusters in the competition this year. Add in a terabyte of memory, plus 10 NVIDIA K40 GPU cards, and you’ve got a pretty powerful stew of compute power.

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like