IndySCC

The IndySCC committee is providing the hardware that the teams will compete using. This hardware will be provisioned using the Chameleon Cloud platform.

Purdue University is supporting the IndySCC by providing and hosting a portion of a retired cluster. The compute nodes that will be available to teams consist of:

• HPE DL60 Gen9
• 2x E5-2660 v3, 2.6GHz, 10 core Haswell CPU
• 64GB RAM
• 1 x 500GB SATA 7200RPM disk
• 10Gb Ethernet fabric
• 2:1 56GB FDR Infiniband

Power caps, static and/or dynamic may be imposed during the final competition as an added element and challenge for competitors. Further details of this will be provided at a later date.

Benchmarks

LINPACK Benchmark

http://top500.org/project/linpack/

The Linpack Benchmark is a measure of a computer’s floating-point rate of execution. It is determined by running a computer program that solves a dense system of linear equations. It is used by the TOP 500 as a tool to rank peak performance. The benchmark allows the user to scale the size of the problem and to optimize the software in order to achieve the best performance for a given machine. This performance does not reflect the overall performance of a given system, as no single number ever can. It does, however, reflect the performance of a dedicated system for solving a dense system of linear equations. Since the problem is very regular, the performance achieved is quite high, and the performance numbers give a good correction of peak performance.

Applications

NAMD

Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics (NAMD) is a molecular dynamics simulation software that simulates large complex systems of atoms and molecules. It is written using the Charm++ parallel programming model.

miniVite

miniVite is a proxy application that implements a single phase of Louvain method in distributed memory for graph community detection.

Mystery Application

At the start of the competition, teams will be given an application and datasets for a mystery application. Students will be expected to build, optimize and run this mystery application all at the competition.

The full rules are published on the Student Cluster Competition website. Some key details are as follows.

Violation of any rule may result in a team’s disqualification from the competition, or point penalization, at the discretion of the IndySCC committee. Any unethical conduct not otherwise covered in these rules will also be penalized at the discretion of the IndySCC Committee.

The following violations will result in immediate disqualification:

• Having anyone other than the 6 registered team members working on the team’s resources during competition hours.
• Any communication between your resources and other computing/HPC resources.

All decisions are the sole discretion of the IndySCC committee, and IndySCC committee decisions concerning the rules in a given situation, are final.

Safety First

While IndySCC is a remote competition, safety should always be a priority while competing from wherever you are. If a task cannot be done safely, then it is unacceptable. When in doubt, ask an IndySCC supervisor or team liaison.

Teams

Advisors are required to be staff, faculty or graduate students of the team’s educational institution(s) or sponsoring HPC center.

Student Team Members must:

• Be enrolled in a university or high school
• Not have received a bachelor’s degree or equivalent before the beginning of the competition

Teams are encouraged to include diverse participation including new participants and under-represented groups. Part of the team application process will ask you to describe how your team is diverse and how you attempted to increase diversity.

Once the competition begins, the six team members must work on the competition tasks with no external assistance – advisors, vendor partners and other supporters must not help the team in any way (other than to occasionally deliver coffee, snacks, etc).

Outsourcing of competition tasks to either paid services or unpaid volunteers is not permitted.

Teams must conduct themselves professionally and adhere to the SC Code of Conduct. Students must compete fairly and ethically.

Hardware

The IndySCC committee will provide the hardware the teams will use during the educational and final competition periods. Teams may not use any other hardware or other resources (other than laptops and PCs for interfacing with the provided hardware) during the final competition or to complete tasks for submission during the educational period.

Other limitations such power draw limitations (static or dynamic) may be implemented as other dimensions to the final competition, so teams may want to consider how they would manage power or prioritize work to fit within constraints. These details will be provided at a later date.

Software

Chameleon Cloud will provide the interface for provisioning the hardware.

All system software (operating system, drivers, filesystems, compilers, etc) used in the competition must be publically or commercially available at the start of the competition.

The benchmark and application executables used in the competition must be built by the team members from open source implementations. Executables may be built in advance by the team members, but teams must provide the URL of the source package (for tarballs etc) or commit hash (for git etc repos). Teams should also be prepared to demonstrate building and running the executable if requested.

Networking

Teams will access all IndySCC resources remotely and will be responsible for providing their internet connection. Teams should only connect to the IndySCC resources using personal computing devices (i.e., external HPC resources should not be connected to IndySCC resources).

Logistics

IndySCC is a fully remote competition and there are no in-person requirements. Teams are encouraged to attend the conference in-person or virtually, however teams are responsible for their own travel arrangements, lodging, conference registration, and any other incurred expenses. Teams may be required to complete posters that the committee will print and display at the conference, record lightning talks that will be replayed at the conference, and remotely attend “meet the teams” sessions during the conference, but no conference registration or in-person attendance will be necessary for these components.