Silicon Mechanics has announced that it is sponsoring the Massachusetts Green Team in the Student Cluster Competition at the Supercomputing 2014 Conference & Exhibition, taking place November 16-21, 2014 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Silicon Mechanics is dedicated to supporting the cutting-edge research that relies on High Performance Computing (HPC). Providing the next generation of HPC professionals the means to hone their skills in an exciting, hands-on competition is a part of that mission. This year Silicon Mechanics has partnered with SUPERMICRO, Intel, Kingston, NVIDIA, and Mellanox Technologies to provide hardware components for the cluster. This year’s cluster contains 8 compute nodes with Intel Xeon processors E5-2680v2, Intel SSD DC S3700 series, Kingston DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU accelerators, and Mellanox ConnectX-3 and SwitchX-2 FDR InfiniBand networking.
This is the fourth year that Silicon Mechanics has sponsored the Massachusetts Green Team, which draws its members from Boston University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Northeastern University. The team, comprised of students of computer engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, and physics, will compete in a real-time, non-stop 48-hour challenge to demonstrate the best sustained performance on four predetermined applications.
“We are excited to support these students as they compete at the SC14 Student Cluster Competition,” said Art Mann, Education/Research/Gov't Vertical Group Manager at Silicon Mechanics. “They are a part of the next generation of researchers utilizing state-of-the-art high performance computing, and we always enjoy being able to watch as they collaborate to solve problems and learn together in such a high energy environment.”
The four application areas in this year’s competition include: ADCIRC (ADvanced CIRCulation model), a system for solving time dependent, free surface circulation and transport problems; NAMD (Not (just) Another Molecular Dynamics program), a parallel molecular dynamics code designed for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems; MATLAB, a tool used to model and simulate a broad cross-section of compute-intensive applications; and a “mystery application,” information about which will be revealed at the competition.
“This year’s competition includes some exciting changes from previous years, including the application areas students will compete in, as well as retaining the mystery application which was a very popular addition last year,” said Kurt Keville, Massachusetts Green Team Advisor.
The winning team will be determined based on a combined score for workload completed, benchmark performance, conference attendance, and interviews. Recognition will be given for the highest LINPACK. The awards for the Student Cluster Competition will be announced at the SC Awards Ceremony on Thursday, November 20, 2014.
