Student Cluster Competition Applications

This year’s competition format and applications are slightly modified from previous years.  The same:  teams will continue to compete for an Overall Winner described below and recognition will be given for the highest LINPACK performance.  Different:  HPCC will not be used this year in the competition, conference participation will be included in the overall score, and the use of profiling tools are strongly encouraged.  The competition applications are:

• LINPACK
  http://top500.org/project/linpack/
  The LINPACK Benchmark solves a dense system of linear equations and is used to rank the top HPC systems in the world.
• Trinity
  http://trinityrnaseq.github.io/
  Trinity, developed at the Broad Institute and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, represents a novel method for the efficient and robust de novo reconstruction of transcriptomes from RNA-seq data. Trinity combines three independent software modules: Inchworm, Chrysalis, and Butterfly, applied sequentially to process large volumes of RNA-seq reads. Trinity partitions the sequence data into many individual de Bruijn graphs, each representing the transcriptional complexity at at a given gene or locus, and then processes each graph independently to extract full-length splicing isoforms and to tease apart transcripts derived from paralogous genes.
• WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting)
  http://www.wrf-model.org/index.php
  The WRF Model is a next-generation mesocale numerical weather prediction system designed to serve both operational forecasting and atmospheric research needs. It features multiple dynamical cores, a  3-dimensional variational (3DVAR) data assimilation system, and a software architecture allowing for computational parallelism and system extensibility. WRF is suitable for a broad spectrum of applications across scales ranging from meters to thousands of kilometers. The WRF Model is written in Fortran 90 and has interfaces written in C,; it depends on MPI and netCDF libraries.
• MILC
  http://www.physics.utah.edu/~detar/milc/
  The MILC Code is a set of codes written in C developed by the MIMD Lattice Computation (MILC) collaboration for doing simulations of four dimensional SU(3) lattice gauge theory on MIMD parallel machines. The MILC Code is publicly available for research purposes.
• HPC repast
  http://repast.sourceforge.net/repast_hpc.html
  Are you ready for the zombie invasion?  Will humanity survive the SC15 SCC?  Teams will use HPC Repast to simulate a zombie invasion like no other.
  Repast for HPC is a next generation agent-based modeling system written in C++ that is useful in social science modeling to understand characteristics of a global population that are difficult to predict based only on the rules that govern the behavior of the agents.
• Mystery Application
  A mystery application will be given to the teams on Monday morning to be run in conjunction with HPL prior to the start of the Monday night Exhibit Gala Opening. This mystery application will take the place of HPCC used in previous years.

Teams are strongly encouraged to learn a profiling tool to gain a better understanding of scientific applications and their interactions with HPC hardware.  Licenses from Allinea will be provided to all teams for the MAP profiling tool, however teams can use other profiling tools as well.

The Overall SCC Winner will be the team with the highest score when combining their correctly completed workload of the four competition applications, mystery application, best HPL run, application interviews, and HPC interview.  The HPC interview will take into consideration the team’s participation in the SC15 conference as well as their ability to wow the judges on their competition know-how.

Teams will be required to attend other aspects of the convention beyond the Student Cluster Competition, which will be included in their final score. Further details will be provided before the competition.