A team of undergraduate students representing the IU School of Informatics is competing in Supercomputing 07, a global competition for university students to harness the power of a modern high-performance computing cluster. Sponsored by IEEE/ACM, the academic challenge brings together teams of students at SC07 taking place this week at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center in Reno, Nev.
The IU team members include Joseph Blaylock; Andrew Schwenker; Adam Hinz; Val Savage; Sarah Loos; and Greg Smith.
The group will travel to Reno with their Apple computer cluster – affectionately named Red Delicious. The green flag drops on Monday night of SC07 for teams to construct, test and tune their respective cluster systems. The informatics team’s challenge is to optimize “Red-D” for a number of pre-designated workloads and programs. Teams gain points based on the level of optimization achieved during the event.
Competition teams must use a single 19″ rack for their system, which cannot exceed a single 30amp, 100-volt circuit. Penalties are issued if the power thresholds are exceeded. The list of Cluster Challenge benchmark applications include:
- High Performance Computing Challenge [HPCC]
- Parallel Ocean Program [POP]
- General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System [GAMESS]
- Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer [POV-Ray]
These scientific applications will be OS-neutral and will provide real-world workloads, which has great instructional benefit. When the competition begins, teams will be handed media with data sets for the applications. Points are awarded for successful processing of data sets and displaying output on the monitors for visitors to follow. Additional information about the Supercomputing 07 Challenge is available at: http://insidehpc.com/2007/10/25/sc07-cluster-challenge/.