16000 kilometers, 128 cores, 11 students, 1 team — The Australian entrance into the international sc
Channel: Linux.conf.au 2014 -- Perth, Australia
Date: 2014-01-17

Full Title: 16000 kilometers, 128 cores, 11 students, 1 team — The Australian entrance into the international scene of competitive Linux system administration
Presenter(s): Adam Chambost
URL: https://lca2014.linux.org.au/schedule/30259/view_talk

(with Merrick Cloete, Michael Cornelio, Evert Freeman‐Metz, Dylan Johnston, Andrew Pech, Ilyas Ridhuan, Michael Swaddle, Jake Snell, Rebecca Tung, Daniel Wheat, and Rebecca Hartman‐Baker).

The Student Cluster Competition is a months-long challenge culminating in a 48-hour non-stop showdown hosted annually at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference. Teams of undergraduates must design, build and optimise a Linux cluster with a 26‐amp power limit to analyse data using a suite of open‐source scientific packages.  Until now, no teams from Australia have qualified for this prestigious event.  In this presentation members of the first Australian team will give an exclusive insight into their preparations, their chosen technical solutions and their experiences at the competition. 

The team of eleven students from three western australian universities were mentored by staff at the iVEC high‐performance computing centre.  Preparing for the competition was challenging, engrossing and required training beyond the scope of current undergraduate curricula. 

The talk will discuss the hardware chosen, the software stack used and the methodologies employed to optimise performance under the given application workload.  The multi-node hybrid CPU/GPU hardware was configured with CentOS Linux and the Lustre distributed file system; version control of our customisations were managed with Git; code debugging and profiling was executed with Allinea DDT and MAP, as well as Scalasca.

Insight into the testbed suite of three open‐source data analysis packages will also be provided. The specific packages were the Nanoelectronics Modelling Tools (NEMO5), the Weather Reporting and Forecasting Model (WRF), and the data‐mining/machine‐learning package GraphLab. The team will discuss how they selected hardware to maximise the performance of these scientific applications and how they compiled and optimised the software to make best use of the hardware chosen.  

How did Australia's first student team fare on the international stage of competitive high‐performance system administration? Come along to our presentation to find out!

http://lca2014.linux.org.au - http://www.linux.org.au
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