LSU Students Prepare for Supercomputing Competition

LSU Students Prepare for Supercomputing Competition

BATON ROUGE—Whether it’s building a small cluster or solving hardware issues, six LSU students have learned more than they could have imagined about supercomputing in the last few months. The LSU team, consisting of Austin Howick, Kenny Barron, McKendon LaFleur, Tung Le, Alex Chretien and Jason Kincl, has been preparing to compete in the Student Cluster Competition at Supercomputing 2010 (SC10) in New Orleans, November 15th – 17th. The team of five LSU computer science students and one LSU computer engineering student was selected based on an application process. Each member has volunteered almost three hours every Tuesday night since June in addition to subgroup meetings and individual time to learn applications, all while keeping up with course work, as well as other extracurricular activities. They all have applications and libraries they must install and configure to perform optimally so that their benchmarks are better than any other team’s.

The team’s coach, Isaac Traxler, Unix Services Manager for LSU’s High Performance Computing, was more than happy to volunteer his time to train the students. The SC10 selection committee chose the LSU team, along with seven others, from a large number of qualified teams who applied. The winning team will be recognized at the SC10 Awards Ceremony luncheon on Thursday, November 18th. The team at LSU hit the ground running in June as they began designing and building a cutting-edge commercially available small cluster, constrained by two 13 amp circuits at 120 volts. LSU was fortunate to have Hewlett-Packard, Mellanox, LATG and the Portland Compiler Group sponsor them and supply the necessary materials.

“The preparation time each team member has put in is incredible. It is a great opportunity for them to apply what they are learning in the classroom and learn from the different obstacles and challenges that have occurred,” said their mentor.

Jason Kincl, CSC Undergrad said, “It is one thing to learn about scientific computing in a classroom. We have found that it is an entirely different story when we are speccing, building, and running a cluster along with learning the simulation software we will run on it. We have all experienced a slice of what it takes to run a HPC cluster and we have all learned a lot.”

During SC10, teams consisting of six students will utilize the amazing power of clusters and the ability to work with open source software to solve interesting and important problems. The competition, which occurs on the exhibit floor, engages students in real-time to run a workload of real-world applications on the clusters they designed, while never exceeding the allowed power limit.

The teams will put together and test their machines to run the High Performance Computing & Communications Council benchmarks on Monday night, until they receive the competition data sets for the competition. Each team will work from Monday night until the close of the exhibit floor on Wednesday evening. Conference attendees will be able to observe each team as they deal with the workload at hand. Not only will students race to complete the greatest number of application runs, but also must impress the judges with their application knowledge.

Throughout the showcase, teams will have the opportunity to show off their skills and knowledge of the equipment. Each team will be scored on the amount of workload completed, benchmark performance and interviews and outreach. The team with the highest combined score will be named the winner. Judges will also recognize the team with the highest LINPACK, as well as SC Fan Favorite.

“Each one of these guys should be extremely proud of themselves for what they have accomplished already, “ said their mentor. “It has been great to see them learn so much about aspects of supercomputing they were very unfamiliar with. Now, they talk about these things as if they are long lost friends.”

The student team will continue meeting each Tuesday to practice application runs until the competition in November. Regardless of whether they win or lose, all agree the training sessions are providing them with a valuable opportunity to practice working with open source software.

McKendon LaFleur, CSC undergrad said, “Time management is probably the most important thing I have learned out of the whole experience. I think we have all learned more about ourselves as we have faced different challenges.”