The rules have been set for this year’s SuperComputing Student Cluster competition, and this year it’s all about “Go Green”.
This year’s SC09 Student Cluster Competition is built around a “Go Green!” theme, tying it in with this year’s show. Just like the previous competition, this year’s rules have capped the overall power requirements of each team’s gear to a pair of 120-volt, 20-amp circuits. Each circuit will have a soft limit of 13 amps. Penalties will be assessed if a respective team trips an alarm on the metered power circuits. Each team’s hardware, along with the metered power units, must fit into a single rack.
The teams & vendors have been set and work is underway. The benchmarks consist of the usual simulation codes, but a great addition this year is VisIt. I don’t see any details yet on what they’ll need to do inside of VisIt, but the fact that is made it into the application run category is a huge win for both the developers of VisIt and visualization scientists everywhere.
via SC09 Student Cluster Competition: Go Green! | insideHPC.com.
First, yes, we were very pleased to be included as part of the competition. As far as the benchmarks: the evaluation criteria is still being determined. From an HPC perspective, we obviously want to stress I/O, compute, and communication.
My initial thoughts were to upsample a toy data set to become a large one, then have them run a script to make a movie. I was thinking a three frame movie with volume rendering, contouring, and a moving slice.
But I’m posting because we’re very open to suggestions if the VizWorld community has some. Please post feedback and we’ll try to roll it in.
Thanks!
-Hank