When the dust finally settled, the teams in aggregate used $61.3K of their combined $70.3K budget. Each team had been given a $3,200 initial budget followed by a “surprise” $500 boost 12 hours before the competition’s end. The biggest single-day aggregate spend was the final day of the competition, which saw over half of the total spend being consumed.

As teams worked to complete the various scientific application challenges their spend fluctuated, sometimes swinging wildly up and down. The combined spending rate was $4500/hour at one point. The peak team spending rate was achieved by the Tsinghua University team, who was using $540/hr at one point in the competition.

Throughout the competition all the teams showed poise, collegiality, and a great spirit of friendly competition as they peppered the application experts, and each other, with questions about how to optimize throughput in the cloud via Slack. The Gromacs molecular dynamics application, with a challenge focusing on COVID-19 research, was of particular relevance this year and presented teams with a unique learning experience. Another challenging application was CESM, where the students looked at how to optimize a climate modeling code. The competition was rounded out by the Reproducibility Challenge, where students had to reproduce results from an SC19 paper and the Mystery Application, miniVite, an Exascale Computing Project mini-application.

Although the competition was grueling and much different this year than at past SC conferences, most student teams found participating to be very rewarding. Both advisors and students agreed that everyone learned a lot about how to run HPC workloads in the cloud. Now all that is left for the teams is the announcement of the winner at the SC20 Awards Ceremony on Thursday, November 19 at 3 pm EST.

The VSCC wouldn’t have been possible without the VSCC Committee, the application experts, poster judges, and the VSCC sponsors: Microsoft, Terawe, and ARM. Their support was critical to making the competition a possibility in the cloud.

Scott Michael, SC20 Student Cluster Competition Chair

Verónica G. Melesse Vergara, SC20 Student Cluster Competition Chair

Students@SC is a platform for students to learn, connect, and grow professionally at the SC conference. The Students@SC cohorts (Student Volunteers, Student Cluster Competition, HPC Immersion, Computing4Change) will all be executed in a fully virtual manner. Students@SC will also be hosting a variety of additional events specifically targeting students!

Students@SC Sessions

Students@SC will host sessions on the SC virtual event platform and via additional external meeting platforms during the day. Recordings will be made available soon after each of the live events. Information on how to join all these events will be clearly displayed on the Students@SC page in the virtual event platform. In addition to the events below, the Students@SC channel will also host SCC Talks, Student Lightning Talks, and Students@SC Alumni Presentations.

Mentoring

SC20 will host two mentoring programs for all conference attendees. You must sign up for these programs by November 2.

Job Fair

Available now and running through January 15, 2021, SC is inviting attendees of all skill levels (students, post-docs, and professionals) to participate in the Job Fair. As applications and résumés submitted will be provided to recruiting organizations, submit your résumé today and help recruiting organizations find you. Employers will be posting their job listings through January. Search the job postings by skill level, area of interest, and more.

Résumé Workshops

SC20 will be providing two virtual résumé workshops during the conference. During these sessions, industry and academic leaders are being asked to provide one-on-one feedback on résumés. These sessions will be held right after each instance of the Perfecting Your Elevator Speech and Growing Your Professional Network Workshop.

To participate in the Résumé Workshops, you must:

• Submit your résumé to the Job Fair.
• Pre-register by October 29 with Sally Ellingson, the Students@SC Programming Chair.

Webinars & Session Videos

For the latest Students@SC webinars and additional student content, visit the Students@SC playlist on the SC Conference Series YouTube channel. Recorded sessions and student interviews will be published there as well.

—

Dr. Christine E. Harvey
SC20 Students@SC Chair

Like many events this year, the SC20 Student Cluster Competition has shifted to a virtual competition. While the pandemic forced the change, it did not curb the enthusiasm surrounding this popular event. For this virtual SCC, or “VSCC,” 17 teams from around the world will compete in a novel setting.

“This year’s Student Cluster Competition will be very different, as it will be 100 percent cloud based,” explained SC20 SCC Team Lead Verónica G. Melesse Vergara, from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“As the VSCC will be run on Microsoft Azure, the VSCC team is still working on updating the rules to make sure the new ones added apply to the cloud. The thought is to have students manage their cloud dollars instead of their power budget,” said VSCC Co-Chair Scott Michael, from Indiana University.

Meanwhile, Vergara added, “There are many new angles we can explore now that the competition is in the cloud. While we will no longer be able to use power as the main limiting factor, we plan to provide the teams with a cloud budget that they will need to learn to manage. I am looking forward to seeing how teams adapt to the cloud, how they prepare and learn about Microsoft Azure, and what mechanisms they come up with to optimize the applications for this new environment.”

“Holding the competition in the cloud also allows us to reach a much wider audience by providing access that before would only have been available to in-person participants,” she continued, “plus, the virtual format reduces cost barriers that have prohibited smaller institutions from applying to the SCC in the past. This will be a great opportunity for the teams to learn a whole set of extra skills in addition to HPC. Having experience in cloud environments will also provide students with an advantage when they start to enter the workforce.”

Meet the Teams

Among the selected participants there is one brand-new team, while some of the returning teams have added new members, sometimes from new educational institutions.

Clemson University, USA

Team Dabo’s Tech Support

• John Hollowell
• Griffin Dube
• Nik Heitzeg
• Sarah Placke
• Cavender Holt
• Sansriti Ranjan

Clemson University will be a first-time competitor, bringing Team Dabo’s Tech Support to the VSCC. Although individual members of the team have worked together in the past, the current group has not competed in HPC-related competitions. Dr. Jon Calhoun, the team’s advisor, explained that this submission represented Clemson’s third attempt at trying to compete in the SCC.

“We all felt that our applications kept getting stronger with every attempt, and, this year, our hard work paid off,” Calhoun said. “With all that is going on in the world and with the university due to COVID, competing at the VSCC gives the students a concrete goal that they can work toward.”

Most team members learned about the SCC via presentations at Clemson. Cavender Holt joined the team after first hearing about high-performance computing and the SCC in Calhoun’s data structures and algorithms course, in the spring 2019. The team was very pleased to learn that they were selected.

“I was very excited, especially after everything that has been going on, and after getting rejected last year,” said Griffin Dube.

Sarah Placke added, “I was thrilled after hearing the news because we reached our goal after working persistently in a field in which most of us were unfamiliar.”

Meanwhile, Sansriti Ranjan shared, “This summer after my internship got canceled, I felt a bit dejected as I was really looking forward to an experience and putting my skills into use. I decided to channel that energy into this opportunity in whatever way I could contribute. On knowing that we were finally selected, it gave me new energy, concrete hope, and something to look forward to building and embarking on this summer. We started with an expectation and ended with an experience that will be worth working for in the days to the competition.”

Dabo’s Tech Support team will have much to offer to this competition. VSCC is happy to welcome this new team and watch them in action.

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Germany

Team deFAUlt

• Ruben Baecker
• Pierre Lindenberg
• Gabriel Dengler
• Timur Perst
• Ricardo Lang
• Marius Fleischer

Team deFAUlt of FAU has an extensive participation record at SCCs. They have qualified for multiple competitions in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Some of their biggest accomplishments were the LINPACK awards at ISC17 and ISC18. Dr. Johannes Hofmann, this year’s team mentor, is happy to present the team members.

“The current team members have all joined the team in April and do not have previous experience in HPC,“ he explained.

Hofmann said his team is “eager to apply the theory learned in lectures and gain practical knowledge in solving hardware optimization problems.” He noted they also are looking forward to pushing state-of-the-art technology to its limits while competing in an international context.

Twitter: @FAU_Germany
Twitter: @SCC_deFAUlt
Facebook: @fauenglish

Tsinghua University, China

Team Diablo

• Chen Zhang
• Jiajie Chen
• Yutian Wang
• Zeyu Son
• Mingshu Zhai
• Runxin Zhong

Returning from Tsinghua University, Team Diablo has an impressive track record as overall champions at SC18 and SC19. To date, they have won more than 10 championships in ASC, ISC, and SC competitions. All of the team members are students from Tsinghua University’s Computer Science and Technology department.

Team Diablo is looking forward to the VSCC. In addition to the competition, they “want to make friends with other teams, which will be a little challenging for this year’s virtual competition, and learn more about parallel computing.”

Twitter: @Tsinghua_Uni

Shanghai Tech University, China

Team GeekPie_HPC 

• Zijun
• Tianyuan
• Kaiyuan
• Yixuan
• Yiwei
• Longwen

The Shanghai Tech University team, GeekPie_HPC, is a student-led association that is participating in SCC for the second year in the row. Professor Shu Yin is GeekPie’s advisor, and the team already has named him “the greatest team advisor.” Per the team, they have been “collecting EECS-related (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) geeks in the School of Information and Science Technology (SIST) at Shanghai Tech.”

On GeekPie_HPC, each team member fills a precise role. Four of the team members, Zijun, Tianyuan, Kaiyuan, and Yixuan, are from Laboratory of I/O System and Data Science (L.I.O.N.) at SIST. They hold different roles in the lab, from parallel file systems to I/O optimization and scientific computing. Yiwei is another team member from System and Software Security lab, SIST, who focuses on symbolic execution. Longwen is part of the ACM-ICPC algorithm team, who already has won several silver awards in nationwide competition.

The team explained it is “growing steadily thanks to success at ASC18, ISC18, and SC19 student cluster competitions and the newcomer influx.” These new members are endowed with “courage, eagerness, and devotion.” The team noted it is especially grateful to the SIST and the university’s Library and Information Center for supporting them with comprehensive HPC resources.

With new energy injected into this vigorous team and more advanced HPC resources this year, GeekPie_HPC is seeking to become one of the most influential student supercomputing teams at SC20’s VSCC.

Facebook: @shanghaitech
Twitter: @ShanghaiTechUni

Wake Forest University, USA

Team Daemon Deacons

• Sophia Fang
• Paul Kefer
• Robert Langefeld
• Hao Tong
• Eva Wu
• Yixin Zhang

From Wake Forest University, the Daemon Deacons will be a third-time competitor in the SCC at SC20. Team Advisor Dr. Sam Cho shared that the team finished first in the Reproducibility Challenge last year, and are ready to improve in the other sections. This international “American” team has representatives from three different nations, and its team members can fluently speak German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish. Two are veterans, including one who participated in two previous SCCs, and four are first-time competitors.

This team is diverse yet complimentary. Fang and Langefeld are both juniors. Fang is interested in biostatistics, while Langefeld favors clinical image analysis, machine learning, and molecular dynamics simulations. Wu, Kefer, Tong, and Zhang are all seniors. Wu is interested in language competence, computer vision, and statistical models. Kefer’s focus is artificial intelligence; Tong’s is biomedical informatics; and Zhang’s is algorithms, machine learning, and HPC. This team is motivated with a fun side: their team slogan is “Never Gonna Give You Up” (the Rick Astley song).

Twitter: @WakeForest
Instagram: @wfuniversity

University of Texas at Austin, USA

Team Cloud CloUT (members revealed at a later date)

The University of Texas at Austin is home to a returning team that won three overall SCC competitions at SC12, SC13, and SC14. Joe Garcia is the team Mentor.

“The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has supported teams from the University of Texas at this competition in previous years. This year our team, “Cloud CloUT,” finds itself with team members that are all first-time competitors,” Garcia explained, “The team is eager to participate in this year’s competition and the extra fun of the competition being completely virtual this year only adds to this excitement. As a team, we look forward to not only the challenges presented with the various applications, but the added bonus of running the apps in a cloud environment. The team hopes to learn much from this experience and enjoy the competition setting.”

Texas A&M University

Team Ag-Jag Cluster (TAMU)

• Michael Lau
• Shaina Le
• Dylan Rodriguez

Team Ag-Jag Cluster (TAMU-SA)

• Petar Lachkov
• Jonathan Rosett
• Selina Urias

Team Ag-Jag Cluster, from Texas A&M University (TAMU), previously participated in the SCC at SC18. The team’s name represents the collaboration between TAMU (Aggies) and Texas A&M University-San Antonio (TAMU-SA) (Jaguars). They are a cross-institutional team participating together for the first time. The students from TAMU-SA are first-time participants and will be paired with TAMU students who have competed in prior SCCs. Dr. Lisa M. Perez (TAMU), the team advisor, with Co-Advisor Dr. Smriti Bhatt (TAMU-SA), are proud to present the team.

“Jonathan [Rosett] is looking forward to learning more and getting personal experience with HPC in general, as he doesn’t have prior experience in the HPC area of computing,” Perez said. “Shaina [Le] is looking forward to learning more about HPC infrastructure and to the experience overall. She typically doesn’t like competing, yet she finds herself in a lot of competitive situations. Since the competition venue is in the cloud this year, she is excited to see how the SC committee formats the competition accordingly and the challenges that will arise with it.

Perez added, “After hearing SC20 would appropriately be renamed VSCC20, Selina [Urias] is looking forward to the challenge of deploying our cluster in the Azure cloud, networking with experts, and researching applications CESM and GROMACS. She is interested to see how the GROMACS challenge can simulate current world issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Twitter: @AgJag_Cluster
Facebook: TAMUSACyber
Instagram: TAMUSACyber

University of California, San Diego, USA

Team SDSC/UCSD

• Hongyi Pan
• Xiaochen (Jacob) Li
• Max Apodaca
• Zihao Kong
• Arunav Gupta
• Vy Nguyen
• Hungry Zou

The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) team, also recognized by the unofficial icon “The Pink Flamingo,” is mentored by Dr. Mary Thomas. This is the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC)/UCSD’s first opportunity to sponsor an SCC team. Thomas said she is excited to bring a team to the SCC event, which includes six members and an alternate.

According to Thomas, this team has been carefully crafted. “The team was formed during the month of July 2020, and each member has distinct qualities that will enhance their role within the competition,” she noted.

Thomas explained that Li is eager to use his knowledge on parallel and quantum computing to determine optimal solutions to the competition’s applications. Apodaca has experience in computer architecture and has dabbled in cloud computing. Kong is focused on embedded system design, and his curiosity about a supercomputer’s architectural design motivated him to participate in the competition. Gupta has wanted to be part of an SCC team since he heard about the SCC from his friends at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Gupta hopes that his software development and cloud computing experience will help the team to be successful. Nguyen is interested in parallel Linux systems, while Zou has a background in systems, databases, and networks that he will use to help the team. Pan will function as a team alternate, who aspires to be a research scientist working in computational linguistics.

“The students on our team are self-motivated, technically competent, highly interested in HPC, and are looking forward to learning about HPC, playing in the cloud, and learning to work with each other as a team,” Thomas said. “The SCC opportunity is important because there is no undergraduate HPC-related program at UCSD, so this gives them an opportunity to develop key skills needed in the future.”

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Team UIUC

• Pranshu Chaturvedi
• Jonathan Nativ
• Jialiang Xu
• Nishant Sheikh
• Freddy Zhang
• Rittika Adhikari

The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) SCC group includes undergraduate students who have been active participants in the SC SCC competitions for the last three years. The team is guided by three experienced mentors, Dr. Volodymyr Kindratenko, Chit Khin, and Yan Zhan (a past SCC competitor), as well as two advisors, Omri Mor and Simeng Liu, both also past SCC competitors.

Nativ, Chaturvedi, and Sheikh will provide their technical know-how as they were part of UIUC’s SCC team at SC19. Chaturvedi has a special interest in computational biology and applied machine learning, while Nativ’s focus is on the hardware and software of large-scale distributed and parallel systems. Sheikh is a freshman in the pre-engineering program and is interested in the application of distributed systems in interdisciplinary research. The three other members are new to the team. The VSCC will mark Zhang’s first experience with HPC, and he is excited to learn more, particularly about hardware systems and computer architecture. The VSCC will also be Adhikari’s first hands-on experience with HPC, and she is excited to learn more about the field, especially in distributed systems and general computer science. Xu, who is majoring in electrical engineering with a computer science minor, was an understudy for SC19 on the IO-500 benchmark application.

The diverse backgrounds of the UIUC team promise to make this challenge interesting to watch. Collectively, they team said they are looking forward to showcasing their skills, meeting other teams, and having fun.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Boston University, USA

Team BUHPC 

• Norman A. Toro Vega
• Parker Van Roy 
• Yujia Zhang
• Po Hao Chen
• Benjamin Li

Team BUHPC is a consortium of schools based in Massachusetts, that competed separately until they merged in 2012. Team Advisor Kurt Keville explained that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) first appeared in the SCC at SC09, and Boston University at SC11. Since then, the schools, which also are university partners with the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), have competed in six SCC, four ISCC, and two ASC events in China in some arrangement.

“We fielded a team in each track of the SC13 competition,” Keville said, “The six teammates this year are all Boston University students.”

Twitter: @BUHPC
GitHub: @BUHPC
Facebook: @bostonuHPC

Nanyang Technological University

Team Supernova 

• Li Shenggui
• Li Mengyang
• Pang Jin Hui
• Dong Yunxing
• Aurelio Jethro Prahara
• Tan Jia Qing

From Nanyang Technological University, Team Supernova is returning for the fourth year in a row, to the SC arena. Team Supernova won the overall championship in SC17 and ranked 2nd place overall in SC18. They broke the LINPACK benchmark record in SC17 and SC18. The team consists of members of different nationalities, and Prof. Francis Lee. is their supervisor.

Team Supernova is known to be very dynamic. They work together closely to deliver results and are eager to learn and explore different fields in high performance computing. They enjoy learning and growing through various challenges. Despite the virtual setting, they are eager to interact and make friends with all the other enthusiastic participants of the VSCC.

Twitter: @realntuhpc

Additional Teams

The following teams will be returning to participate in the SC20 VSCC as well.

• Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
• Northeastern University, USA
• North Carolina State University, USA
• Peking University, China
• Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
• Southern University of Science and Technology, China
• Team Warsaw, Poland

—

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.

Torsten Hoefler, a computer science professor at ETH Zürich, presented an opportunity to participate in a Student Cluster Competition (SCC) to his class. Lukas Kapp-Schwoerer, a computer science student and teaching assistant at ETH Zürich, was enthusiastic about the opportunity. He and Manuel Burger, a student in his last Bachelor’s degree year majoring in computer science, and their like-minded friends decided to create a team. Unfortunately, after competing with the team at ISC19, Kapp-Schwoerer could not join the competition at SC19. By then he had a BA degree in business.

Hoefler also was excited to mentor his students through this adventure. He immediately applied for them to participate at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC).

At that time, however, the team, consisting of Manuel Burger, Jan Kleine, Thore Goebel, and Valeria Jannelli, lacked two essential members. Built on friendship, camaraderie was an important factor when the group went recruiting among their classmates for two additional teammates, Simon Jacob and Emir Isman, who rounded out the team.

“Wir suchten Leute, die sich der Sache gleichermassen verschreiben würden.”

“We were looking for people that were equally dedicated,” Burger said, once the team was complete.

“Da wir alle Kommilitonen sind, trafen wir uns häufig an der Universität in Pausen und ausserhalb Vorlesungen. Wir versuchten uns jeden Mittwoch zu treffen um anstehende Aufgaben zu besprechen und die Arbeit aufzuteilen. Zusätzlich hatten wir spontane Treffen ausserhalb der fest geplanten Besprechungen. Ein Teammitglied, Valeria Jannelli, befand sich in einem Austauschsemester in Tokyo, Japan und wir hielten sie permanent auf dem Laufenden.”

“Since we were all classmates, we would meet at university, as well as outside of classes. We tried to meet every Wednesday to discuss what we needed to do and separate the tasks. We also had spontaneous meetings outside those meetings. Valeria Jannelli, one of our team members was studying in Tokyo, Japan for the semester, so she followed us remotely.”

When the team competed at ISC2019 they were awarded third place. That success gave them the confidence to apply to SCC at SC19.

ETH Zürich’s team received great support from the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, known as CSCS, their school, and their mentor, Hoefler. Burger says the team was very grateful that CSCS put them in contact with Hussein Harake, the HPC system manager at CSCS. He helped direct the team to vendors. Harake also made sure the team was invited to the 2019 Swiss Conference & HPCXXL User Group, where they had the opportunity to meet their sponsors in person.

“Das alleine war schon eine unglaubliche Erfahrung für das Team.”

“This in itself was already an incredible experience for the team,” Burger said.

“Wir erhielten auch grosse Unterstützung von CSCS Vizedirektor Michele De Lorenzi. Wir reisten mehrere Male nach Lugano, um dort die Systemadministration und Hardwarezusammenstellung zu besprechen.”

“We also received great support from Michele De Lorenzi, CSCS Deputy Director. We went to Lugano (CSCS) a couple of times, where we exchanged about how to administer system and different equipment options.”

These encounters provided the ETH Zürich team sponsorships from the following companies:

• Intel: CPUs and storage drives
• NVIDIA: GPUs
• Mellanox: Interconnects
• GIGABYTE: Motherboards and server chassis
• DALCO AG: Swiss system integrator, helping with assembly and configurations, etc.

The team also applied to the Swiss Hasler Stiftung (Hasler Foundation) to request travel funding and support for associated expenses, which were granted.

SCC Challenges and Successes

As with other international-based teams, ETH Zürich’s trip to SCC at SC19 had its share of logistical hurdles.

“Das System wurde nicht an den richtigen Ort geliefert,”

“Our system was not sent to the right destination,” Burger explained.

“Unser Cluster wurde in teilweise wiederverwendetem Verpackungsmaterial versendet. Zusätzlich zu unseren Standinformationen waren Cray– und CSCS-Beschriftungen daran. Die Zusteller waren verwirrt. Am Sonntag suchten wir die gesamte Messehalle nach unserem Material ab und die Logistik bestätigte uns die erfolgreiche Zustellung mehrfach. Montagmorgens kam eine Dame zu unserem Stand und fragte uns, ob eine grosse Kiste an ihrem Stand uns gehörte, da sie nicht von ihnen sei. Das Rätsel war gelöst; unser System wurde zum CSCS-Stand geliefert. Wir waren nun 48 Stunden hinter den anderen Teams.” 

“Our cluster was wrapped in refurbished material. It had Cray and CSCS labels, as well as our cluster booth information glued on it. The deliverers got confused. On Sunday, we ran all over the show floor to find our material that the sender kept confirming it as delivered. Monday morning, a woman came to our booth and asked us if this huge box was ours as it wasn’t theirs. The mystery was solved, it had been delivered to the CSCS booth. We were now 48 hours behind the other SCC teams.”

Although this logistical hiccup made for a rough start, it did not hinder team morale or motivation. Burger thought the experience was invaluable.

“Wir können aktuelle Hardware nutzen.”

“We got to use recent hardware,” he said.

“Alles was wir in Vorlesungen lernen, können wir nun praktisch anwenden. Jetzt können wir wirklich verstehen, wie Dinge gemacht werden, was sie bedeuten und bewirken.”

“Everything we are taught in lectures became hands on. We were able to actually understand how to do things and what it all means and does.”

Throughout the competition Burger was surprised to see the numerous vendors and show attendees, as well as their sponsors, come and exchange ideas with them.

“Leute würden einfach bei uns auftauchen und mit uns sprechen.” 

“People would just pop up and chat,” he said.

“Wir fanden dann heraus, dass sie die CTOs von dieser und jener Firma wären. Manche hinterliessen uns ihre Visitenkarten und wiesen uns auf Praktikums- oder Stellenangebote hin. Das war eine unglaubliche und anregende Erfahrung. Wenn wir wieder es wieder machen könnten, würden wir sofort.”

“We would then find out that they were the CTO of such and such. People would leave us their cards and tell us that they would like to see us apply for internships or jobs after the competition. This was an incredible, invigorating experience. If we could do it again together, we would.”

—

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.

What makes the work of the student teams particularly relevant is the replication of the paper’s work across the sixteen different clusters that will be fielded by the teams. In the era of heterogeneous computing, porting applications from one platform to another is not a simple task. The work of the student teams at SC20 is a fantastic way to dive into reproducibility challenges across heterogeneous platforms and emerge with shareable, robust insights. It is the ensemble of each team’s implementation and execution of the challenge on sixteen different platforms that will earn this paper ACM’s “Results Replicated” badge in the ACM digital library. Sharing is at the core of the Reproducibility Challenge – so, the work of the SCC teams will be collected and published. We have already published three special issues in Parallel Computing from three previous years (SC16, SC17, SC18).

Putting Together the Benchmark

Many volunteers participate in the selection of the paper, the creation of the benchmark for the SCC teams, the assessment of the students’ work, and the publication of the special journal issue.

During the first round of reviews to determine feasibility for the competition, the reviewers looked at whether the finalist papers had an application that could be run by the student teams on the broad range of hardware types and cluster configurations that are typically fielded by SCC teams. This initial review eliminated nearly 80% of the potential papers because, for example, they used proprietary compilers, ran only on specific hardware, or reproducing the results required a larger scale than the SCC clusters could provide.

A second round of reviews, including at least three for each paper, looked for which application would be best suited for the SCC teams. The committee then ranked the submissions based on criteria such as the application’s real-world impact as understood by undergraduates, and the student experience while working with the benchmark. Discussions with the authors of the finalist papers focused on the feasibility of adapting their applications to the Student Cluster Competition in cases where the information was not readily available in the submitted paper. Following these interviews, the committee met to determine which application to invite.

The selection of the paper is only one step in a long process that ends with the preparation of the Reproducibility Challenge benchmark – one of four benchmarks that the students must meet during the competition. The Reproducibility benchmark will be revealed at SC20. Following the conference, we will publish the students’ reports from the SC20 SCC Reproducibility Challenge, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the SCC teams and their success in replicating the code on the sixteen platforms.

Mark Your Calendar

The Student Cluster Competition will be held Monday–Wednesday, November 16–18, 2020. Visit the SCC booth in the Exhibit Hall at SC20 and chat with students about the Reproducibility Challenge. We invite you to celebrate the student participants and the authors of the selected paper at the Awards Ceremony on Thursday of the conference. And don’t miss next year’s SCC reports!

Join us in Atlanta to meet these amazing students and watch them race to reproduce this benchmark and three other HPC applications on the exhibit floor.

More about the SCC

—

Scott Michael, SC20 Student Cluster Competition Chair
Stephen Lien Harrell, SC20 Reproducibility Challenge Chair

Sebastian Bönning, a member of the DeFAUlt team from Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, recalls his team’s harrowing SC19 Student Cluster Competition experience. With a dead SSD drive and only one node left, the competition proved to be quite a challenge.

Inspired by Sebastian’s story? Get your team together, as Student Cluster Competition applications close on May 4. And if you think you have a scientific application that would be a good fit for the SCC Mystery Application, those submissions close on April 15.  

Be sure to check out all the excellent opportunities for students at Students@SC. 

Read more student success stories. 

—

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.