HPC Challenge Awards Competition at SC09

HPC Challenge Award BOF

The DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) Program and IDC are pleased to announce the annual HPC Challenge Award Competition (www.hpcchallenge.org). The goal of the competition is to focus the HPC community's attention on developing a broad set of HPC hardware and HPC software capabilities that are necessary to productively use HPC systems. The awards session will be held during the SC09 conference.

The core of the HPC Challenge Award Competition is the HPC Challenge benchmark suite developed at the University of Tennessee under the DARPA HPCS program with input from a wide range of organizations from around the world (see http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/).

The Competition will focus on four of the most challenging benchmarks in the suite:

  • Global HPL
  • Global RandomAccess
  • EP STREAM (Triad) per system
  • Global FFT
For the HPCC Awards there will be two classes of awards.

Class 1: Best Performance (4 awards - $750 each)

Best performance on a base or optimized run submitted to the HPC Challenge website. The benchmarks to be judged are: Global HPL, Global RandomAccess, EP STREAM (Triad) per system and Global FFT. The prize will be $750 plus a certificate for the best of each.

Class 2: Most Productivity (1 award - $2000 may be split)

Most "elegant" implementation of four or more of the HPC Challenge benchmarks with special emphasis being placed on: Global HPL, Global RandomAccess, EP STREAM (Triad) per system and Global FFT. This award would be weighted 50% on performance and 50% on code elegance, clarity, and size. Both will be determined by an evaluation committee. For this award, the implementer must submit to hpcc-awards AT cs.utk.edu (by October 24th, 2009) a short description of:

  • the implementation,
  • the performance achieved,
  • lines-of-code, and
  • the actual source code of their implementation.

The evaluation committee will select a set of finalists who are invited to give a short presentation at the HPC Challenge Award BOF at SC09. This presentation is judged by the evaluation committee to select the winner. The total prize is $2000 plus a certificate for this award and is split among the "best" entries.

The Class 1 awards are decided based on benchmark results and should be a clear cut. Benchmark results are accepted up to the last moment.

The Class 2 award is more subjective. The submission procedure works as follows:

  • Early bird entry to get feedback on the submission is by October 1st. We provide feedback by October 7th so the submission could be improved.
    • This is to help for compliance of the rules
    • Only get one shot at an early bird submission (the process is not iterative)
  • The final deadline is October 24th for the submission.
  • Awards Committee chooses 3 finalists who each makes a presentation at the SC09 session and winners are chosen at the session and the prize is given there.

For more information or questions on the HPCC Challenge Awards, please contact:
hpcc-awards AT cs.utk.edu.

Awards Committee:

  • David Bailey, LBNL NERSC
  • Jack Dongarra, (Co-Chair) U of Tennesse/ORNL
  • Jeremy Kepner, (Co-Chair) MIT Lincoln Lab
  • Bob Lucas, ISI
  • Rusty Lusk, Argonne National Lab
  • Piotr Luszczek, U of Tennessee
  • John McCalpin, TACC
  • Rolf Rabenseifner, HLRS, Stuttgart
  • Daisuke Takahashi, U of Tsukuba
  • Jeff Vetter, ORNL

The HPC Challenge Benchmark is supported by DARPA, DOE, NSF, and IDC.

See also: Last year, the evaluation committee selected a set of finalists who were invited to give a short presentation during the HPC Challenge Award BOF at SC09. This presentation will be judged by the evaluation committee to select the winner. The prize was $2000 plus a certificate for this award and was split among the "best" entries. The awards were presented at the HPC Challenge Award BOF at SC09.

The following are the winners of the 2009 HPC Challenge Class 1 Awards:

G-HPL Achieved System Affiliation Submitter
1st place 1533 Tflop/s Cray XT5 ORNL Buddy Bland
1st runner up 736 Tflop/s Cray XT5 UTK Steve Whalen
2nd runner up 368 Tflop/s IBM BG/P LLNL Tom Spelce
G-RandomAccess Achieved System Affiliation Submitter
1st place 117 GUPS IBM BG/P LLNL Tom Spelce
1st runner up 103 GUPS IBM BG/P ANL Scott Parker
2nd runner up 38 GUPS Cray XT5 ORNL Buddy Bland
G-FFT Achieved System Affiliation Submitter
1st place 11 Tflop/s Cray XT5 ORNL Buddy Bland
1st runner up 8 Tflop/s Cray XT5 UTK Steve Whalen
2nd runner up 7 Tflop/s NEC SX-9 JAMSTEC Kenichi Itakura
EP-STREAM-Triad (system) Achieved System Affiliation Submitter
1st place 398 TB/s Cray XT5 ORNL Buddy Bland
1st runner up 267 TB/s IBM BG/P LLNL Tom Spelce
2nd runner up 173 TB/s NEC SX-9 JAMSTEC Kenichi Itakura

The following are the winners of the 2009 HPC Challenge Class 2 Awards:

Award Recipient Affiliation Language PDF
Best Performance $1000 George Almási IBM UPC and X10 PDF
Most Elegant Implementation $1000 Steve Deitz Cray Chapel PDF
Honorable Mention Jinpil Lee University of Tsukuba XcalableMP PDF


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