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San Diego State University @ SC 2016 Student Cluster Competition (SCC16)
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At SC16, SDSU participated in the Student Cluster Competition (SCC16) for the first time. This activity provided faculty with the opportunity to reach out to our undergraduates and provide them with a richer undergraduate experience, to enhance our curricula by incorporating HPC concepts, and to contribute to the field of HPC. Through funding from Intel, the SC Student Volunteer program, and the CSRC, we were able to bring 14 students and faculty (from COS and COE) to SC! Members of the team, led by Dr. Mary Thomas (CS) included: undergraduate students Ali Esparza, Tuan Nugyen, Armando Ramos, Gary Williams, Briana Wright (CS), and Vaughn Ganem Haka (CE); graduate students Greg Behm and Bill Byrd; and faculty members Dr. Rob Edwards (CS); Dr. James Otto (CSRC); Dr. Chris Paolini (Engineering); Dr. Peter Blomgren (Math); and Dr. Jose Castillo (Director, CSRC).

The scope of effort included the following activities:

  • learn to build and admin a 16 node, 350 core cluster
  • learn the basics of parallel programming, including MPI using C, Fortran, and possibly other languages
  • learn to run HPC applications in the areas of bioinformatics, numerical methods, password security, and other applications
  • learn to visualize big data sets using ParaView
  • work as a team to develop and run the items above
  • compete against 13 other SCC teams from around the world.

The outcomes from our experiences at SCC16 were rich, and resulted in several successes: two students obtained internships at the San Diego Supercomputing Center; one student is planning on pursuing a Ph.D. in computational science; one student enrolled in a graduate parallel computing class; and the team was invited to contribute a paper to the Journal of Parallel Computing Special Issue on Reproducibility and to present a poster at the annual CSRC ACSESS meeting. A significant outcome of this activity included an invitation to contribute to a special edition of the Journal of Parallel Computing on the reproducibility challenge. For the challenge, the team was given a paper from SC15 and they had to try to reproduce the results presented in the paper:

SC16 Student Cluster Competition Challenge : Investigating the Reproducibility of Results for the ParConnect Application. Williams, G; Behm, G; Nguyen, T; Esparza, A; Haka, V G; Ramos, A; Wright, B; Otto, J.; Paolini, C. P.; and Thomas, M. P. Manuscript Accepted for Publication, 2017.
A copy of our final report can be found here: Final Report
 
 
 

A BIG thanks to our SCC16 Sponsors!
 
sponsor
 
Intel Corporation 		sponsor
 
Open HPC Community 		sponsor
 
NVIDIA Corporation
 
sponsor
 
Computational Sciences Research Center 		sponsor
 
San Diego Supercomputing Center 		sponsor
 
San Diego State University