The Students@SC program is implementing innovative ideas for SC20 in light of the new challenges that COVID-19 is presenting.

“I’m very excited we’re able to offer remote participation for the Student Volunteers program, the Student Cluster Competition, and HPC Immersion. With the coronavirus pandemic and travel restrictions currently in place, we have realized that many students in our community won’t be able to participate in Atlanta. It is critically important to the SC Conference to continue to create educational, networking, and career opportunities for students unable to attend SC in person,” says Christine Harvey (MITRE Corporation), SC20 Students@SC Chair.

Student Volunteers

The SC20 committee is dedicated to providing the community with the best possible conference experience for all participants. To that end, while we are still planning for an in-person experience, SC20 will also provide remote participation opportunities for the conference in November 2020 for those who are unable to travel to Atlanta due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This means that we will have both a virtual and on-site Student Volunteers Program for SC20. Due to the uncertainty at this time with international travel, only students residing within North America as of November, 2020 are eligible for the on-site Student Volunteers Program. Anyone residing in North America that is concerned with traveling to the conference can also apply for the virtual Student Volunteers Program.

Check out the FAQ for more details on the Student Volunteers program! The deadline for applications is June 26.

Apply to be a student volunteer

Student Cluster Competition

The SC Conference is modifying the Student Cluster Competition to a Virtual Student Cluster Competition (VSCC) at SC20 in order to support remote participation. The computation for this year’s competition will be held completely in the cloud allowing student teams to participate remotely from their home institution, or in person at the conference. This implies that acceptance to and participation in the VSCC will not require on-site participation in Atlanta.

“The entire VSCC will be run on the Microsoft Azure cloud. We are still working on updating the rules to make sure we add new ones that apply to the cloud, and change the ones that don’t make sense when hardware is not on the floor. We will most likely have students manage their cloud dollars rather than their power budget. I don’t want to say too much today though, as we would like to keep some suspense,” shares Scott Michael, VSCC Co-Chair and Manager, Research Applications and Deep Learning, at Indiana University.

Dr. Harvey adds, “Participation in the Student Cluster Competition is an incredible commitment that requires months of planning, coordinating with vendors, and learning cluster management skills. We recognize that for many students and mentors planning travel to Atlanta in November can be overwhelming. Moving the entire SCC to the cloud will help us facilitate teams from around the world while still allowing those that can participate in Atlanta to do so on a level playing field.”

Accepted teams will therefore be given the option to travel to Atlanta and participate in person. This decision must be made by each team by September 1, 2020 to enable the SC Conference sufficient time to plan for accommodations. Depending on restrictions that will be in place in November, the VSCC may need to limit the number of teams allowed to participate and receive accommodations on-site.
The deadline for applications closes July 3.

Apply to the VSCC

HPC Immersion

The SC20 committee is dedicated to providing the community with the best possible conference experience for all participants. To that end, while SC20 is still planning for an in-person experience, it will also provide remote participation opportunities for the conference in November 2020 for those who are unable to travel to Atlanta due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This means that both a virtual and on-site HPC Immersion Program will be implemented. Due to actual international travel uncertainties, only students residing within North America as of November 2020 will be eligible for the on-site HPC Immersion Program. Anyone residing in North America that is concerned with traveling to the conference can also choose to apply for the virtual HPC Immersion Program.

Dr. Harvey shares, “HPC immersion is a brand new program at SC20 to really engage undergraduate students in the field. With the option for remote participation, we should be able to reach a wide range of students and introduce them to a future in HPC. ”

The deadline for applications is June 26.

Apply to HPC Immersion

Networking Opportunities

Students@SC is being very creative in organizing special team building and networking events that make SC such a unique experience for student volunteers.

Dr. Harvey discloses, “Social distancing has forced networking to virtual platforms, which can be limiting to many who are getting started in HPC and working on building their community. We plan to offer virtual networking events for students in our programs and general student attendees. While we’re still working on logistics, we’re looking forward to hosting our annual Mentor-Protégé Program and Speed Mentoring events at SC20.”

Onward and Upward

Dr. Harvey and the whole Students@SC committee are imagining a new era for Students@SC with the goal of retaining the SC philosophy of inclusivity, sharing, and opportunity.

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Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.

Student cluster competitions have grown from the original six-team contest at SC07 in Reno, Nevada into three highly competitive events each year: the SC Student Cluster Competition in the United States, the ISC Student Cluster Competition in Europe, and the ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge in Asia.

These events are fun, challenging, and memorable — and a great way to grow HPC skills and build your personal network along the way. Applications for the SC20 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) are open until June 19, 2020. Here are some tips to help your team join the fray.

A free first tip: Register for and join the SCC webinar being held on May 5. It will help you prepare!

1. Form a Team and Find Sponsors

It doesn’t matter when you begin preparing, but of course the earlier you start the more preparation time you’ll have. Competition for places at the November SC event is rigorous, but if you don’t get in this year there are two more competitions, and you’ll have a head start for next year, too. And your team’s preparation will help build skills and interests that can launch you into an amazing HPC career.

For the SC SCC you’ll need six students, and an advisor from a sponsoring institution – your college or an HPC center. Collaborating with one or more vendor sponsors is also highly valuable.

Your sponsoring institution or vendors are expected to provide your hardware (often a loan), funding for shipping and freight handling of the equipment, and transportation for the team to the event. They’re also encouraged to provide booth signage, swag, and a per diem for the team’s daily expenses during the event. For the SC20 SCC, conference registration and accommodations for the team and advisor are provided by SC.

Your sponsors should also provide access to hardware for practicing well in advance of the actual competition. Unfortunately, we’ve found that vendors often can only provide the competition hardware a few weeks before it needs to be shipped, so you’ll need access to something else for practice until then.

2. Planning Your Cluster

You’ll need to know the approximate architecture of your cluster to submit your application. At a minimum, you’ll want some compute nodes, some storage, and an ethernet switch. Check the competition rules for power limits. This year the SC20 SCC power limit has been raised to 4500W (see SCC Rules).

There’s a tradeoff between performance, flexibility, and power. An accelerator can give great performance per watt for some applications, but others need power-hungry general purpose CPUs. Memory and storage use power too, so don’t forget to include these in your calculations!

Take a look at the list of applications (see SCC Benchmarks and Applications), and work with your vendor to find the configuration that will give you the best chance.

Don’t forget an enclosure to build it in! And you’ll need keyboards and monitors for the initial build and boot, and laptops and networking equipment to connect to your cluster during the competition.

3. Learning and Practicing

There’s a lot to learn! Here’s a short list of things to get comfortable with on your practice cluster:

Basic Cluster Use

• Working in the terminal: bash, git and vi or emacs
• Building from source code: compilers, linkers, makefiles, and build systems
• Running parallel applications on a cluster or cloud (watch for this webinar)

System Administration

• Installing, provisioning, and booting/rebooting
• Finding and using config files
• Managing users and groups
• Starting and stopping services
• Mounting, sharing and unmounting filesystems
• Managing a parallel file system (IO500 is one of the SC20 SCC benchmarks!)
• Networking essentials
• Logs and troubleshooting

Application Performance

• How a CPU works (moving stuff through memory and pipelines, what hyperthreads do, how accelerators are connected)
• How a multi-socket, multicore, hyperthreaded processor works
• Parallelism, MPI, OpenMP and accelerators

The SC20 SCC applications have been announced (see SCC Benchmarks & Applications). Choose someone on your team to learn the following for each:

• What does it do?
• What are the inputs and outputs?
• What approach to parallelism does it use?

Building, running, measuring, and tuning each application in advance will put you in good stead for the competition, and for your career in HPC afterwards.

Following an occurrence at the first SCC, the SC SCC traditionally includes at least one power outage, so practice recovering from this potential disaster.

The reproducibility challenge requires writing a paper. Pro tip: You can do most of this in advance and update it with your official results at the competition. But getting some experience with LaTeX is good preparation for a career in computational science. Learning to use Python, Jupyter, Pandas, and Plotly for analysis and graphing of your results will also offer benefits both during the competition and after.

4. Don’t Forget the Logistics!

With help from your sponsors, you’ll be responsible for arranging transportation for your team and your equipment. The SCC happens on the exhibit floor, where your vendor or school may be shipping equipment already, so it’s likely they can manage that for you. If not, you’ll receive information from Freeman (the company that manages the exhibit floor) about shipping equipment to the convention center. Don’t forget to budget for the cost of shipping and storage fees!

5. Bring the Right Attitude and Have Fun

Winning is fantastic, but 99% of the benefit you’ll gain from a student cluster competition comes from participating. Take some time out to attend conference sessions and explore the exhibit hall. You’ll see exciting new developments and make connections with industry leaders and visionaries. HPC is a collaborative industry. An inquisitive and cooperative attitude will go farther than a cut-throat, competitive one. Stay safe, have fun, and tackle hard challenges (even unsolvable ones). The lessons and memories will stay with you forever.

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Stephen Leak, SC20 SCC Member

First-time participant Manuel Burger, of ETH Zurich, presents his “roller coaster” experience as a team member in the Student Cluster Competition at SC19.

 Being an IT connoisseur isn’t all it takes to succeed in this venture.” — Manuel Burger

Inspired by Manuel’s story? Student Cluster Competition applications open February 10, 2020. Be sure to check out all the excellent opportunities for students at Students@SC. 

Read more student success stories. 

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Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.