Student Cluster Competition

23 Jul 2021, 00:01 → 24 Sep 2021, 23:59 Africa/Johannesburg

Online

Nyameko Lisa (CHPC)

23 July - 24 September 2021 (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 2021 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 2022 International Supercomputing Conference in Germany.

If you are applying from an institution outside of South Africa, please use this link Student Cluster Competition - Africa

This competition registration 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 Friday 23 July to Friday 24 September 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 2022 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

Friday, 23 July

00:01 → 00:31 Linux CLI intro 1

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

Speaker: Matthew Cawood (CHPC)

00:31 → 02:01 Linux CLI intro 2

Text editor
Manipulating Files

Speaker: William Phukungoane

02:01 → 02:11 Morning break

02:11 → 02:51 Linux CLI intro 3

Services, logs and debugging

Speaker: Sakhile Masoka

02:51 → 03:31 Linux CLI intro 4

Speaker: Bryan Johnston

03:31 → 05:01 Lunch

05:01 → 05:16 Practical 1 Overview

Intro to OpenNebula and tutorial basics

Speaker: Israel Tshililo

05:16 → 08:16 Practical 1

08:16 → 08:31 Practical 1 Recap

Saturday, 24 July

00:01 → 00:51 Intro to HPC

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

Speaker: Bryan Johnston

00:51 → 01:41 HPC Software 1

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

Speaker: Israel Tshililo

01:41 → 01:51 Morning break

01:51 → 02:41 HPC Software 2

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

Speaker: Matthew Cawood

02:41 → 03:31 HPC Applications & Users

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

Speaker: Andrew Gill

03:31 → 05:01 Lunch

05:01 → 05:16 Practical 2 Overview

Speaker: Israel Tshililo

05:16 → 08:16 Practical 2

08:16 → 08:31 Practical 2 Recap

Sunday, 25 July

00:01 → 00:51 Hardware 1

Computer hardware x64, components, accelerators
Dell pricelist examples

Speaker: Bryan Johnston

00:51 → 01:41 Hardware 2

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

Speaker: Matthew Cawood

01:41 → 01:51 Morning break

01:51 → 02:41 Hardware Considerations

Communication, I/O, vectorisation, memory bandwidth

Speaker: Matthew Cawood

02:41 → 03:31 Schedulers

Resource manager, workload manager, policies,practical job submissions

Speaker: Sakhile Masoka

03:31 → 05:01 Lunch

05:01 → 05:16 Practical 3 Overview

Speaker: Israel Tshililo

05:16 → 08:16 Practical 3

08:16 → 08:31 Practical 3 Recap

Monday, 26 July

00:01 → 00:51 Parallel Computing Concepts

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

Speaker: Bryan Johnston

00:51 → 01:41 Code Compilation

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

Speaker: Matthew Cawood

01:41 → 01:51 Morning break

01:51 → 02:41 Benchmarking

Speaker: Matthew Cawood

02:41 → 03:31 Special Topics

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

Speaker: Zama Mtshali

03:31 → 05:01 Lunch

05:01 → 05:16 Practical 4 Overview

Speaker: Israel Tshililo

05:16 → 08:16 Practical 4

08:16 → 08:31 Practical 4 Recap

Tuesday, 27 July

00:01 → 00:51 HPC Usecase

Speaker: Cawood Matthew

00:51 → 01:41 Q&A

01:41 → 01:51 Morning break

01:51 → 03:31 Practical time

03:31 → 05:01 Lunch

05:01 → 07:31 Practical Time