The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) scooped the top prize in the international Student Cluster Competition held at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Germany last week.
The international competition took place in front of ISC attendees from around the globe who met in Frankfurt to share the latest developments in high performance computing.
The award ceremony features small teams that compete to demonstrate the incredible capabilities of state-of- the-art high-performance cluster hardware and software. In real-time, 12 teams of six undergraduate and/or high school students build a small cluster of their own design on the ISC exhibition floor and race to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications, according to CHPC.
The South African winning team took the overall prize, beating 11 other contenders from across the globe. The team was made up of a group of eight students from the University of the Witwatersrand and Stellenbosch University, says the centre.
Other entrants included students from Purdue University and the University of Colorado in the US, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Tsinghua University in China and more.
Tendani Tsedu, media relations manager at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, says the international competition is a culmination of two rounds of national competition processes that CHPC starts every April with a call to students at all universities in the country.
"The participants were required to build small HPC clusters out of hardware provided by the CHPC and its industrial partners. They were given a selection of applications to optimise and run on their cluster to demonstrate their design's performance.
"Each team was assigned a budget of approximately R200 000 and a parts list from one of the CHPC's industry partners. With this budget and parts list, the team had to design a cluster," he explains.
Once the cluster's design was finalised, adds Tsedu, the hardware specification was submitted to the CHPC's partners for manufacturing. The hardware, as specified in the cluster design, was delivered to the exhibition floor of the CHPC national meeting.
"At the national meeting the teams unpacked their equipment, constructed their cluster, installed the software stack and performed benchmarks. The teams were judged on a combination of the performance of the applications and the design of the cluster," he notes.
The CHPC is no newcomer to this competition. The centre won the top prize in 2013 and 2014 and took second prize in 2015. The winning team, who were under the supervision of CHPC engineers and other experts, were sponsored by Dell SA, which provided them with equipment, travel, accommodation, meals and training for the ISC competition, reveals Tsedu.
"The South African team is the only team that enters a brand new team each year. This is done to give as many students as possible exposure to the international HPC community, he concludes.
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