On U.S. local Time November 10-16, the well-known International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC) was held in Salt Lake City, Utah, among which Student Cluster Competition (SCC) was concluded through 5-day fierce competition. Eight teams, which were selected out of more than 30 global participant teams, went through competitions in floating-point performance optimization, system overall performance optimization, and domain-specific application software optimization, and they also had to pass on-site Question-and-answer session. At last, three teams were granted SCC Overall Winner Award, SCC Highest LINPACK Award, and SCC Fan Favorite Award. Representing China Mainland to participate this international competition for the first time, USTC Sugon Team was awarded the second prize of SCC Overall Winner Award, following the champion team University of Texas within a minute gap. In the competition for the Highest LINPACK Award, which aimed at evaluating the stability of the each team’s computing platform, USTC Sugon Team and team from National University of Defense Technology(NUDT) covered the first and the second prize respectively.
USTC Sugon Team and Team from NUDT
USTC Sugon Team Members
SC is the global top conference in supercomputing. SC Awards given at the SC conference each year are reputed to be the Oscar Award of supercomputing circle. With 24 years’ history, SC conference gathers famed supercomputing institutions, universities and vendors each year and is also viewed as the arena for global top IT companies to show new products and technologies. Nearly 40,000 participants attended the unprecedented SC'12 conference. The most spectacular exhibition focused on Student Cluster Competition, known as the Olympic Game of student's supercomputing. It is the touchstone of high performance computing talents for next generation, and seen to be a wind vane for future development of high performance computing. Seldom of Chinese team participated this competition before, while in SCC'12, USTC Sugon Team, a joint team composed by USTC and Sugon Corporation, stood out of the fierce competition of more than 30 rival teams and reached the top 8 global finals for the first time, turning out to be the spotlight of multiple attendants. What was coincident was that there was another new participant team competing into the top 8 global finals, whose tutor was an alumnus of USTC, Dr. Chen Yong, thus the USTC faculty and students competed in the same stage, which was highly noticed and favored by the participants.
USTC Sugon Team on the SCC’12 Competition Site
On Beijing Time November 8th, USTC Sugon Team stepped onto the expedition. Before their journey, the leaders of School of Computer Science and Technology gave team members a mobilization talk, encouraging them to compete with the spirit of USTC and give the best account of themselves. On U.S. local time November 10th, after a simple greeting meeting with the participant teams, they started the initial system building and tuning. In as less as one and half day for system building, General Coach Professor AN Hong and Sugon Corporation engineer Liang Yang led the whole team to open 17 system component packages, engaging in system assembling, testing, and tuning without a single halt.
“My God, Lots of stuff!”
The competition began at 7 o’clock on November 12th. The competition situation altered in the blink of an eye, and unpredictable problems came one after other: one minute the computer node failed to work and needed to be changed; the next minute was network card’s turn to be replaced; or system overheated and measures must be taken to adjust the hardware frequency to keep the temperature down. What was worse, the system could not boot up as the competition just began! Everyone’s nerve was fraying all at once. After solving these problems and booting up the system, new troubles were found that the program which was initially well tunned could not run, which was well compiled could not recompile at all, which was planned to run on GPU had to run on CPU. The well-planned job scheduling strategy was extremely disturbed by numerous problems in the competition. Our team overcame severe time difference reaction and neglected journey fatigue; calmly applied the multiple emergency plans prepared in daily training and tackled all the problems, finally getting rid of all the troubles one by one.
In the SCC’12 Competition
Through three days’ consecutive tense competition, USTC Sugon Team eventually reached the top 8 global finals. The committee panel of on-site Question-and -answer session proposed a serial of professional questions aiming at the problems in the test. USTC Sugon Team replied to panel’s questions on technologies in optimizing high-performance computing system and applications, put forward their understanding in HPC industry and application, giving deep impression to the judges, who also expected USTC Sugon Team to obtain better achievements in the next year’s attendance.
On-site Question-and-answer Session
Professor AN Hong conducted a post-competition conclusion on the training and competition process. As early as July 30th, Sugon Corporation signed cooperation contract with USTC on setting up USTC Sugon Team alliance to fight for SC’12. During four-month preparation phase, Sugon Corporation provided substantial supports in offering training and competition equipment, arranging professional crews to engage in the design, installation and tuning of the computer for the competition, assisting this young team to get familiar with the relating knowledge. AN Hong said, as a team first participating international competition, though the team members were devoid of international competition experience, they could initiatively learn and absorb others’ successful experience; they all trained diligently in daily time, giving up their summer vocation and holidays in this academic term, experimenting numerous day-and-night optimization, tuning and tests before the official competition.
During the competition, they spared no efforts to fulfill their mission, some of whom only rest for 3-5 hours; some even persisted competing for 24 hours, displaying their tenacious fighting spirit and wining respect in SCC. Viewing form the 3-score gap with the champion team, there does not exist a pointed distance on the general technical capacity between USTC Sugon Team and the champion team. Therefore, through persistent training and the elevation in technical level, it is very promising for USTC to win more splendid achievements in the future SCC competition.
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