Student Cluster Competition

1 Jul 2019, 08:30 → 6 Jul 2019, 17:00 Africa/Johannesburg

University of Pretoria

David Macleod (CHPC)

1 - 6 July 2019 (Team Selection)

30 November - 4 December 2019 (Competition)

Hosted by

the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC)
of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST).

The CHPC invites applications from suitably qualified candidates to enter the CHPC Student Cluster Competition. The CHPC Student Cluster Competition gives undergraduate students at South African universities exposure to the High Performance Computing (HPC) Industry. At the CHPC's 2019 National Meeting teams build small HPC clusters on the exhibition floor from hardware provided by the CHPC and our industrial partners. The winning team is entered into the ISC Student Cluster Competition hosted at the 2020 International Supercomputing Conference in Germany.

The competition is only open to South African students enrolled in a computer science related degree who are in 2nd year if enrolled in a 3 year degree, or in 2nd or 3rd year if enrolled in a 4 year degree.

Team Selection is designed to impart critical knowledge for building a cluster, this includes: using Linux systems, the basic software stack of a cluster and cluster design. Team Selection concludes with an assignment which requires each team to build a prototype cluster in the Cloud. The results from the Team Selection project and this application are used to select the teams which will proceed to the CHPC Student Cluster Competition.

The Team Selection round will run from Monday 1 July to Saturday 6 July at the University of Pretoria.

Teams chosen in the selection round proceed to the CHPC Student Cluster Competition where they build small HPC clusters on the exhibition floor at the CHPC National Meeting. The participants are given a selection of applications to optimise and run on their cluster to demonstrate their design’s performance. The winning team is entered into the 2020 ISC Student Cluster Competition.

Each team is assigned a budget and a parts list from which they must design their cluster. The hardware, as specified in the cluster design, is delivered to the exhibition floor of the CHPC National Meeting. The teams are judged on a combination of their benchmark results and the design of their cluster.

There are no fees for successful applicants. The CHPC will cover the costs of accommodation during all events as well as travel and conference fees.

For more information email: competition@chpc.ac.za

Assignment round_1_assignment.pdf

Poster SCC Poster

Tutorials

• tutorial_1.pdf
• tutorial_2.pdf
• tutorial_3.pdf
• tutorial_4.pdf

Monday, 1 July

08:30 → 09:00 Linux CLI intro 1

Lab setup
What & Why Linux (text vs. GUI)

Speaker: Matthew Cawood (CHPC)

09:00 → 10:30 Linux CLI intro 2

Text editor
Manipulating Files

Speaker: William Phukungoane

10:30 → 10:40 Morning break

10:40 → 11:20 Linux CLI intro 3

Services, logs and debugging

Speaker: Sakhile Masoka

11:20 → 12:00 Linux CLI intro 4

Speaker: Bryan Johnston

12:00 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 13:45 Practical 1 Overview

Intro to OpenNebula and tutorial basics

Speaker: Israel Tshililo

13:45 → 16:45 Practical 1

16:45 → 17:00 Practical 1 Recap

Tuesday, 2 July

08:30 → 09:20 Intro to HPC

History, why/how, hardware/software, fields, careers, history of computers, von neumann, compilers

Speaker: Bryan Johnston

09:20 → 10:10 HPC Software 1

Software, services (NFS, NTP, Ganglia, scheduler), change management, environment variables, provisioning (PXE)

Speaker: Israel Tshililo

10:10 → 10:20 Morning break

10:20 → 11:10 HPC Software 2

MPI - why, how, compiling MPI code, code example & runnng, mpi distributions, openMP code and example

Speaker: Matthew Cawood

11:10 → 12:00 HPC Applications & Users

Theory: scientific fields & codes, HPC users, distributed codes

Speaker: Andrew Gill

12:00 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 13:45 Practical 2 Overview

Speaker: Israel Tshililo

13:45 → 16:45 Practical 2

16:45 → 17:00 Practical 2 Recap

Wednesday, 3 July

08:30 → 09:20 Hardware 1

Computer hardware x64, components, accelerators
Dell pricelist examples

Speaker: Bryan Johnston

09:20 → 10:10 Hardware 2

HPC node specs, memory channels, redundancy, parallel FS, interconnects, racks+blades - density, SMP vs NUMA

Speaker: Matthew Cawood

10:10 → 10:20 Morning break

10:20 → 11:10 Hardware Considerations

Communication, I/O, vectorisation, memory bandwidth

Speaker: Matthew Cawood

11:10 → 12:00 Schedulers

Resource manager, workload manager, policies,practical job submissions

Speaker: Sakhile Masoka

12:00 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 13:45 Practical 3 Overview

Speaker: Israel Tshililo

13:45 → 16:45 Practical 3

16:45 → 17:00 Practical 3 Recap

Thursday, 4 July

08:30 → 09:20 Parallel Computing Concepts

Amdahl's Law
Lhadma's Law
Moore's Law
Concurrency

Speaker: Bryan Johnston

09:20 → 10:10 Code Compilation

Failed compiles, error messages, linking, environment, make clean, warnings, logs

Speaker: Matthew Cawood

10:10 → 10:20 Morning break

10:20 → 11:10 Benchmarking

Speaker: Matthew Cawood

11:10 → 12:00 Special Topics

linux tricks: bash scripts, bash history, running commands remotely (ssh -t / pdsh)

Speaker: Zama Mtshali

12:00 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 13:45 Practical 4 Overview

Speaker: Israel Tshililo

13:45 → 16:45 Practical 4

16:45 → 17:00 Practical 4 Recap

Friday, 5 July

08:30 → 09:20 HPC Usecase

Speaker: Cawood Matthew

09:20 → 10:10 Q&A

10:10 → 10:20 Morning break

10:20 → 12:00 Practical time

12:00 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 16:00 Practical Time