IndySCC

The IndySCC is a virtual companion competition to the SCC that shares many of the same goals. Each year, far more team applications are received than can possibly be brought to the conference. It takes a significant amount of time and effort to put a team together, so the IndySCC was formed to provide additional opportunities for these teams to apply their hard work, gain experience, and come back stronger the next year and make it into the SCC.

Teams applying to the SCC may indicate they would like to be considered for IndySCC if they are not selected to the SCC. Teams who do not indicate they are interested in the IndySCC will not be considered if not selected for the SCC. Indicating you would like to be considered for the IndySCC is not a guarantee to be selected for the competition.

Teams may also apply directly to the IndySCC, without being considered for the SCC. This serves as a lower bar for entry for teams that may not have existing strong vendor relationships or sufficient funding to travel to the conference, or who are looking to gain a footing in the cluster competition world before applying to the SCC. The goal for teams participating in the IndySCC is that they are able to travel to the conference and compete in the SCC in a later year.

The IndySCC is intended for less experienced teams, and final selections will be made considering the strength of the application, motivations as they relate to the goals of IndySCC, and the team’s level of experience with prior cluster competitions.

Selected teams are invited to participate in a remote competition from late summer to November:

• Phase 1/Late Summer: Familiarizing with the provided resources and learning about the virtual platform
• Phase 2/August: Learn how to run and optimize industry standard benchmarks and the provided architecture
• Phase 3/September & October: Real-world applications, the science behind them, and optimizing them for performance
• Phase 4/November: A 48-hour contest similar to and held prior to the SCC

Students, with the guidance of their advisor, will craft a proposal that describes their team, their approach to the competition, and what they hope to get out of the experience. This proposal is submitted as a team application for review by the SCC committee. The application consists of several prompts detailed below.

Your proposal will describe your team members, their strengths and weaknesses, and how everyone will work together in order to successfully compete. A good proposal will describe how the team members have different strengths and skills (i.e., academic studies and inclusion of non-STEM majors) and how they will work together and contribute to a strong team. This should not be a simple list of each team member’s qualifications, the reviewing committee will want to see how you will work together as a team.

Additionally, you will need to describe your team’s diversity. This does not mean academic diversity, but rather diversity in other areas such as underrepresented groups in your home region and institution. Diversity is relative to where you are from, so it can be helpful to describe what diversity means to your team and institution. You should also describe what efforts you made to recruit a diverse team – this is especially important if your team is not as diverse as you would have liked.

You will then need to describe the team’s relationship with your institution. Describe any support such as any training or resources they are providing to help you prepare. It takes a village to build a team, so we want to see that you have a village backing you. 

Next you will describe how your team will prepare for the competition. We are looking for evidence that you have a plan to prepare. This could include things like meeting regularly to work on the cluster, explore topics, practice, attend guest lectures, etc. Mentioning any classes the team members are taking that directly relate to the competition may also be helpful, but be sure to explain how they will benefit the team rather than listing a course catalog. 

Finally, you will describe your team’s educational goals and what your team hopes to gain by participating in the competition. In particular, describe why you would like to participate in the IndySCC rather than the SCC. You should be as specific as possible with your goals rather than listing vague high level goals – we want to know what makes your team unique!

All teams will be provided remote or cloud-based HPC resources and guidance on accessing the resources. Continuous support is provided by HPC experts in the months leading up to the competition. Webinars are recorded for the virtual platform, the benchmarks, and the two applications. At the end of each phase, teams will turn in a report and receive feedback from the experts. There is no in-person component to the IndySCC – the competition is fully remote – however, participants are encouraged to source travel support from their local institution and supporters to attend the conference in person.

High-Performance Linpack (HPL)

The HPL benchmark solves a (random) dense linear system in double precision arithmetic. It is often used to measure the peak performance of a computer or that of a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster. The ranking of the TOP500 supercomputers in the world is determined by their performances with the HPL benchmark.

Read more: https://netlib.org/benchmark/hpl/

MLPerf Inference

Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly being used in many scientific domains for making groundbreaking innovations. MLPerf Inference is a benchmark suite for measuring how fast systems can run models in a variety of deployment scenarios. The key motivations behind this benchmark is to measure ML-system performance in an architecture-neutral, representative, and reproducible manner.

Read more: https://mlcommons.org/benchmarks/inference-datacenter/