Team of Computer Science Students Claim Victory at Supercomputing Challenge

Students won the seventh annual Student Cluster Competition (SCC) this year at the Supercomputing ’12 (SC12) conference in Salt Lake City. SC12 is the seminal international conference for high-performance computing.

 

AUSTIN, Texas — A team of computer science undergraduates, mentored by staffers of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), won the seventh annual Student Cluster Competition (SCC) this year at the Supercomputing ’12 (SC12) conference in Salt Lake City.

SC12 has been the seminal international conference for high-performance computing (HPC) for the past 24 years.

The SCC challenges rival teams of university undergraduates in a 72-hour battle to prove that they can design, build, optimize and run the fastest and most efficient cluster computing system. In this real-time, nonstop competition, teams of six students assemble their clusters on the exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest sustained performance across a series of applications and scientific workloads.

The University of Texas team took first place in the overall standings, breaking the two-year winning streak of Team Taiwan (National Tsing Hua University).

“None of us expected to win, but we didn’t expect to lose either … We were thrilled,” said Craig Yeh, a third-year computer science major in the College of Natural Sciences. “The win validated all of the work we did since May leading up to the competition. I highly recommend this experience to other students at The University of Texas.”

The winning student team members are Andrew Wiley, Reid Douglas McKenzie, Michael Teng, Anant Rathi, Craig Yeh and Julian Michael. Learn more about the team members.

The competition draws teams from around the world, including the United States, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Russia and Taiwan. The teams work with company sponsors several months in advance to design and build a cutting-edge system from commercially available components.

This year, the University of Texas team and TACC partnered with Dell, Nvidia and Intel to design and build a hybrid, power-saving system that integrated graphic processing units (GPUs), Intel processors and a new-generation Dell chassis. The company sponsors provide the hardware and travel funds, while the TACC mentors work side by side with the students to teach them the fundamentals of cluster construction, systems administration and program optimization. Chevron and Mellanox Technologies also served as sponsors of this year’s team.

One additional challenge of the competition is that the systems cannot exceed a 26 amp power limit, which is the electrical equivalent of three standard-size coffee makers.

“It’s a real-world situation,” said John Lockman, the team’s lead mentor and a member of TACC’s High Performance Computing group. “For example, a data center in industry might need to expand but can’t due to financial or space constraints, so they have a limited amount of power and a scientific workload that they have to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time.” John Cazes and Carlos Rosales-Fernandez, also from TACC, helped mentor the students.

TACC and its industry partners have sponsored student teams in the competition since 2010, when the University of Texas team received the highest Linpack score and was the first team in the competition’s history to submit a Linpack score higher than a teraflop. In 2011 the university’s team built an energy-saving cluster that was submerged in mineral oil. It had the highest Linpack score among CPU-only teams.

“We had the opportunity to manage an entire project at a high level to get real science results. For me, the exposure to the scientific applications was the best part,” Yeh said.

For more information about the overall competition, please visit the official SC12 Student Cluster Competition page.

Media Contact: Faith Singer-Villalobos, Texas Advanced Computing Center, 512-232-5771