Benchmarking and Competition instructions for the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) 2024 Student Cluster Compettion (SCC). Which is hosted by the National Integrated Cyber Infrastructure Systems (NICIS), a division of the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). For 2024 the competition will be held in person at the Broadwalk International Convention Centre, Gqeberha, South Africa.
The benchmarks were chosen to be compatible with the software environment that you previously setup in the first round of this competition. For this round, you are allowed to install any legally obtained software you wish to run the problems. However, using obscure, nonstandard software may limit the support you receive from the competition organizers.
You are strongly encouraged to make use of any resource available to you. However, be advised that the competition organizers will provide limited technical support and assistance in building and running your applications.
Team mentors are encouraged to support and motivate their teams. However, they may not do any of the work for the students. They are strictly there to provide guidance and suggestions, and are there to participate in the conference for their own benefit as well.
Team captains will each be issued a competition USB flash drive. This is how the teams may be given input files and how teams will submit their results. Only the Team captain can approach the organizers’ booth, to submit and/or receive any relevant input files. Only one Team captain is allowed at the organizer's booth at any time.
Benchmarks must be submitted by the deadline as specified in the timetable. Resubmission of a previously submitted benchmark will only be allowed if the benchmarks due on that day have been completed and submitted, and the benchmark being resubmitted was originally submitted before its due date. If a team misses a submission deadline and wishes to submit the benchmark for a pass, they may do so only if the benchmarks due on that day have already been submitted. A late submission penalty of 10% will be applied for each day the missed benchmark is late, calculated from its original submission date.
It is important to note that only valid submissions will be considered. For a submission to be valid, all required deliverables for each of the benchmarks must be met. If a team completes the benchmarks scheduled for a particular day ahead of the deadline, they may submit them and move on to the next set. However, approval from the organizers is mandatory before proceeding, and no new benchmarks may be started until the current set has been validly submitted.
The competition organizers will give teams a general indication of where they should be, in the morning at the beginning of the day, and again in the afternoon at the end of the day.
The competition will end on Wednesday, 4th of December at 12:00am midday.
Rulings and decisions from the competition organizers are final.
Good Luck!
| Application | Weight | Breakdown |
|---|---|---|
| HPCC & HPCG | 20% |
|
| MILC | 10% | NERSC MILC [10%] |
| MATLAB Coding Challenge | 10% |
|
| LAMMPS | 10% |
|
| NWChem | 10% | |
| PennyLane | 10% |
|
| RegCM | 10% | |
| Fan Favorite | 5% | |
| Presentation | 15% |
|
The role of Mentors and Volunteers is to provide leadership and guidance for the student competitors participating in this year's Center for High Performance Computing 2024 Student Cluster Competition.
In preparing your teams for the competition, your main goal is to ensure that you teach and impart knowledge to the student participants in such a way that they are empowered and enable to tackle the problems and benchmarking tasks themselves.
Under no circumstances whatsoever may mentors touch any competition hardware belonging to either their team, or the competition hardware of another team. Mentors are encouraged to provide guidance and leadership to their (as well as other) teams.
Any mentors found to be directly in contravention of this rule, may result in their team incurring a penalty. Repeated infringements may result in possible disqualification of their team.
In addition to supporting their teams, mentors are also strongly encouraged to participate in the Main Conference. There are a number of interesting talks, panels, workshops, tutorials and tracks scheduled for this year's conference. Coordinate and plan with your teams accordingly, so that you may make the best use of your time here by providing support, as well as enjoying and learning from the conference.
Below is a table with a number of Linux system commands and utilities that you may find useful in assisting you to debug problems that you may encounter with your clusters. Note that some of these utilities do not ship with the base deployment of a number of Linux flavors, and you may be required to install the associated packages, prior to making use of them.
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| ssh | Used from logging into the remote machine and for executing commands on the remote machine. |
| scp | SCP copies files between hosts on a network. It uses ssh for data transfer, and uses the same authentication and provides the same security as ssh. |
| wget / curl | Utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web.It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols. |
| top / htop / btop | Provides a dynamic real-time view of a running system. It can display system summary information as well as a list of processes or threads. |
| screen / tmux | Full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes (typically interactive shells). |
| ip a | Display IP Addresses and property information |
| dmesg | Prints the message buffer of the kernel. The output of this command typically contains the messages produced by the device drivers |
| watch | Execute a program periodically, showing output fullscreen. |
| df -h | Report file system disk space usage. |
| ping | PING command is used to verify that a device can communicate with another on a network. |
| lynx | Command-line based web browser (more useful than you think) |
| ctrl+alt+[F1...F6] | Open another shell session (multiple ‘desktops’) |
| ctrl+z | Move command to background (useful with ‘bg’) |
| du -h | Summarize disk usage of each FILE, recursively for directories. |
| lscpu | Command line utility that provides system CPU related information. |
| lstotp | View the topology of a Linux system. |
| inxi | Lists information related to your systems' sensors, partitions, drives, networking, audio, graphics, CPU, system, etc... |
| hwinfo | Hardware probing utility that provides detailed info about various components. |
| lshw | Hardware probing utility that provides detailed info about various components. |
| proc | Information and control center of the kernel, providing a communications channel between kernel space and user space. Many of the preceding commands query information provided by proc, i.e. cat /proc/cpuinfo. |
| uname | Useful for determining information about your current flavor and distribution of your operating system and its version. |
| lsblk | Provides information about block devices (disks, hard drives, flash drives, etc) connected to your system and their partitioning schemes. |