Student Cluster Competition

Africa/Johannesburg
Online

Online

David Macleod (CHPC)
Description

17 August - 23 October 2020 (Team Selection)

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 Innovation (DSI).

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 2020 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 2021 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 17 August to Friday 23 October and will be hosted online.

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 2021 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, where applicable.

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

    • 01:00 01:30
      Linux CLI intro 1 30m

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

      Speaker: Matthew Cawood (CHPC)
    • 01:30 03:00
      Linux CLI intro 2 1h 30m

      Text editor
      Manipulating Files

      Speaker: William Phukungoane
    • 03:00 03:10
      Morning break 10m
    • 03:10 03:50
      Linux CLI intro 3 40m

      Services, logs and debugging

      Speaker: Sakhile Masoka
    • 03:50 04:30
      Linux CLI intro 4 40m
      Speaker: Bryan Johnston
    • 04:30 06:00
      Lunch 1h 30m
    • 06:00 06:15
      Practical 1 Overview 15m

      Intro to OpenNebula and tutorial basics

      Speaker: Israel Tshililo
    • 06:15 09:15
      Practical 1 3h
    • 09:15 09:30
      Practical 1 Recap 15m
    • 01:00 01:50
      Intro to HPC 50m

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

      Speaker: Bryan Johnston
    • 01:50 02:40
      HPC Software 1 50m

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

      Speaker: Israel Tshililo
    • 02:40 02:50
      Morning break 10m
    • 02:50 03:40
      HPC Software 2 50m

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

      Speaker: Matthew Cawood
    • 03:40 04:30
      HPC Applications & Users 50m

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

      Speaker: Andrew Gill
    • 04:30 06:00
      Lunch 1h 30m
    • 06:00 06:15
      Practical 2 Overview 15m
      Speaker: Israel Tshililo
    • 06:15 09:15
      Practical 2 3h
    • 09:15 09:30
      Practical 2 Recap 15m
    • 01:00 01:50
      Hardware 1 50m

      Computer hardware x64, components, accelerators
      Dell pricelist examples

      Speaker: Bryan Johnston
    • 01:50 02:40
      Hardware 2 50m

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

      Speaker: Matthew Cawood
    • 02:40 02:50
      Morning break 10m
    • 02:50 03:40
      Hardware Considerations 50m

      Communication, I/O, vectorisation, memory bandwidth

      Speaker: Matthew Cawood
    • 03:40 04:30
      Schedulers 50m

      Resource manager, workload manager, policies,practical job submissions

      Speaker: Sakhile Masoka
    • 04:30 06:00
      Lunch 1h 30m
    • 06:00 06:15
      Practical 3 Overview 15m
      Speaker: Israel Tshililo
    • 06:15 09:15
      Practical 3 3h
    • 09:15 09:30
      Practical 3 Recap 15m
    • 01:00 01:50
      Parallel Computing Concepts 50m

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

      Speaker: Bryan Johnston
    • 01:50 02:40
      Code Compilation 50m

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

      Speaker: Matthew Cawood
    • 02:40 02:50
      Morning break 10m
    • 02:50 03:40
      Benchmarking 50m
      Speaker: Matthew Cawood
    • 03:40 04:30
      Special Topics 50m

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

      Speaker: Zama Mtshali
    • 04:30 06:00
      Lunch 1h 30m
    • 06:00 06:15
      Practical 4 Overview 15m
      Speaker: Israel Tshililo
    • 06:15 09:15
      Practical 4 3h
    • 09:15 09:30
      Practical 4 Recap 15m
    • 01:00 01:50
      HPC Usecase 50m
      Speaker: Cawood Matthew
    • 01:50 02:40
      Q&A 50m
    • 02:40 02:50
      Morning break 10m
    • 02:50 04:30
      Practical time 1h 40m
    • 04:30 06:00
      Lunch 1h 30m
    • 06:00 08:30
      Practical Time 2h 30m