{"id":106631,"date":"2014-07-23T11:54:58","date_gmt":"2014-07-23T09:54:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=106631"},"modified":"2014-07-23T11:58:26","modified_gmt":"2014-07-23T09:58:26","slug":"how-sas-supercomputer-champs-won","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/technology\/106631-how-sas-supercomputer-champs-won.html","title":{"rendered":"How SA\u2019s supercomputer champs won"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the second year in a row, South Africa has won the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) Student Cluster Competition, defending our title<\/strong><\/a> as world supercomputing champions.<\/p>\n

The ISC ’14 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) was held on 23\u201325 June 2014 in Leipzig, Germany and saw 11 teams from around\u00a0the world competing for the crown.<\/p>\n

However, while team South Africa may have caused an upset<\/a>\u00a0when it won the SCC last year, we did not send the same team back to Leipzig to defend our title.<\/p>\n

Our team was selected by the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) through a national competition in which many universities compete.<\/p>\n

The following students made it into the CHPC team: Eugene de Beste (UWC<\/abbr>), Nicole Thomas (UWC<\/abbr>), Saeed Natha (UWC<\/abbr>), Warren Jacobus (UWC<\/abbr>), Pieter Malan (SU<\/abbr>), Ellen Nxala (UFH<\/abbr>), Kevin Beyers (NMMU<\/abbr>), and Hardus Bodenstein (NWU<\/abbr>).<\/p>\n

As part of their prize for winning the CHPC\u2019s national competition, the team of 8 students (which includes 2 reserves) travelled to Dell\u2019s headquarters and the Texas Advanced Computing Centre at the University of Texas in Austin.<\/p>\n

There the team received a tour of the facilities and access to experts who could answer their questions about various aspects of supercomputing.<\/p>\n

Dell sponsored both trips and also sponsored the equipment the team needed to compete in the ISC \u201914 SCC.<\/p>\n

Winning the ISC \u201914 SCC<\/h3>\n

To win the ISC\u2019s Student Cluster competition, teams had to run a number of benchmarks on their clusters (and have them perform well), while keeping their power consumption below 3 kilowatts (kW).<\/p>\n

Teams are also faced with a surprise task on the third day, and have to impress judges during an interview.<\/p>\n

On day 1, the benchmarks were LINPACK, and High Performance Computing Challenge (HPCC); and on day 2 teams ran OpenFOAM, Quantum Espresso, and High Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG).<\/p>\n

On the third day of the competition, teams had to run the Gadget benchmark and face the surprise task.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe surprise task on day 3 was a new concept for the competition,\u201d David Macleod from the CSIR told MyBroadband.<\/p>\n

Normally the teams have a power budget of 3kW and must complete tasks while trying to achieve the best performance.<\/p>\n

For the surprise task this was flipped.<\/p>\n

\"ISC14<\/a>

ISC 14 SCC surprise task start, power consumption over time<\/p><\/div>\n

\"ISC14<\/a>

ISC14 SCC surprise task end, power consumption over time<\/p><\/div>\n

Instead of a power budget, teams had a performance budget and a 20 minute window in which they had to complete a task with the lowest peak power consumption.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother nice aspect about this challenge was that everyone has to complete the task at the same time,\u201d Macleod said. \u201cThis meant that everyone could see how all the clusters were performing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Being able to see how teams were performing relative to one another in real time was especially satisfying for the CHPC team, Macleod said.<\/p>\n

The above graph shows the different teams\u2019 power consumption over time during the surprise challenge.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you normally expect to see is that the higher the power consumption, the better the performance,\u201d Macleod said.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor most of the competition our power consumption was well below the 3kW limit so it didn\u2019t look like we were doing very well,\u201d he explained. \u201cThen came the surprise task.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the start of the surprise task, team South Africa\u2019s power consumption was the lowest and it was therefore expected that their run would be the longest and they would complete the task last.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo everyone\u2019s surprise we not only used the least power but also finished the task first,\u201d Macleod said.<\/p>\n

\u201cFinishing the job first didn\u2019t mean anything for that task, but it showed to everyone that just because our power consumption had been low throughout most of the competition it didn\u2019t mean we were doing badly. It was at that point I realised that we had a shot at winning again so I told the team they had to ace the interview,\u201d Macleod said.<\/p>\n

Macleod reported that the team did really well in the interview and impressed the judges with their cluster\u2019s design, their knowledge, and how well they worked together as a team.<\/p>\n

In the end, the CHPC cluster was well balanced and very power efficient compared to the other clusters in the field that day, Macleod said.<\/p>\n

More SA science achievement news<\/h3>\n

Holy petaFLOPS! South Africa wins supercomputing crown again<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

South Africa discovers triple black hole system: SKA<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

SA-based scientist first African to receive international award<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Great South African inventions<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Photo of the winners by Sabine Diedering<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The South African team in the International Student Cluster challenge recently won the competition for the second time in a row \u2014\u00a0here\u2019s how they did it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":104871,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[20103,20101,26031,225,25625,25615,25629,35,20093,25627,25637,25617,25639,25623,25619,25631,25613,25633,25635,25621],"class_list":["post-106631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-centre-for-high-performance-computing-chpc","tag-council-for-scientific-and-industrial-research-csir","tag-david-macleod","tag-dell","tag-ellen-nxala","tag-eugene-de-beste","tag-hardus-bodenstein","tag-headline","tag-international-supercomputing-conference-isc","tag-kevin-beyers","tag-nelson-mandela-metropolitan-university-nmmu","tag-nicole-thomas","tag-north-west-university-nwu","tag-pieter-malan","tag-saeed-natha","tag-stellenbosch-university-sun","tag-texas-advanced-computing-centre-tacc","tag-university-of-fort-hare-ufh","tag-university-of-the-western-cape-uwc","tag-warren-jacobus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106631"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106631"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106641,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106631\/revisions\/106641"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}