The HPC Challenge committee is 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 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 contributions 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:

1. Global HPL
2. Global RandomAccess
3. EP STREAM (Triad) per system
4. Global FFT

Class 1: Best Performance (4 awards)

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.

Class 2: Most Productivity (at least 1 award)

Most "elegant" implementation of at least four and at most five computationally intensive kernels. At least 3 tests of the Class 1 have to be included (choose from Global HPL, Global RandomAccess, EP STREAM Triad per system and Global FFT). At most 2 kernels may be selected that are not currently included in HPC Challenge (this allows more flexibility for the participants to show the strength of their system and implementation). The kernels not present in HPCC need to conform to HPCC's rigor: they need to include testing, verification, and performance reporting components. Also, justification needs to be provided as to why the new kernels were chosen for submission: the stress is on relevance for computational science and the difficulty of parallel implementation and optimization. An example set of computational kernels is included in the following publications:

1. The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley (EECS-2006-183)
2. The Parallel Computing Laboratory at U.C. Berkeley: A Research Agenda Based on the Berkeley View (EECS-2008-23)
3. Communications of the ACM, October 2009 (Vol. 52, No. 10)

Submissions that include additional kernels are equally welcome.

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, 2012) a short description of:

• the implementation,
• the performance achieved,
• lines-of-code, and
• the actual source code of their implementation.
• optionally: justification for choosing a computational kernels not present in HPCC

Evaluation and Scoring

The evaluation committee will select a set of finalists who are invited to give a short presentation at the HPC Challenge Awards BOF at SC12. This presentation is judged by the evaluation committee to select the winner. Multiple winners could be selected.

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

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, 2012. We provide feedback by October 7th so the submission could be improved.
  • This is to help for compliance of the rules
  • Only one attempt at an early bird submission is allowed (the process is not iterative)
• The final deadline is October 24th, 2012 for the submission.
• Awards Committee chooses finalists who make a presentation at the SC12 session and winners are chosen at the session.

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

See also:

• Class 2 Official Specification
• Class 2 QuickRef Document
• Class 2 Additional Rules
• FAQ

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 SC11. This presentation was 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 following are the winners of the 2012 HPC Challenge Class 1 Awards:

G-HPL	Achieved	System	Affiliation	Submitter
1st place	9,796 Tflop/s	K computer	RIKEN AICS	Mitsuo Yokokawa
1st runner up	1,534 Tflop/s	Cray XT5	ORNL	Buddy Bland
2nd runner up	1,344 Tflop/s	IBM Power 775	IBM Development Engineering	Ramakrishnan Rajamony
G-RandomAccess	Achieved	System	Affiliation	Submitter
1st place	2,021 GUPS	IBM Power 775	IBM Development Engineering	Ramakrishnan Rajamony
1st runner up	472 GUPS	K computer	RIKEN AICS	Mitsuo Yokokawa
2nd runner up	117 GUPS	IBM BG/P	LLNL	Tom Spelce
G-FFT	Achieved	System	Affiliation	Submitter
1st place	205.9 Tflop/s	K computer	RIKEN AICS	Mitsuo Yokokawa
1st runner up	132.7 Tflop/s	IBM Power 775	IBM Development Engineering	Ramakrishnan Rajamony
2nd runner up	11.9 Tflop/s	NEC SX-9	JAMSTEC	Kenichi Itakura
EP-STREAM-Triad (system)	Achieved	System	Affiliation	Submitter
1st place	3857 TB/s	K computer	RIKEN AICS	Mitsuo Yokokawa
1st runner up	525 TB/s	IBM Power 775	IBM Development Engineering	Ramakrishnan Rajamony
2nd runner up	398 TB/s	Cray XT5	ORNL	Buddy Bland

The following are the winners of the 2012 HPC Challenge Class 2 Awards:

Award	Presenter	Affiliation	Language	PDF
Best Performance	Olivier Tardieu	IBM	X10	slides
Most Elegant Language	Bradford L. Chamberlain	Cray	Chapel	slides

The following are the finalists of the 2012 HPC Challenge Class 2 Awards:

Finalists (Submitter)	Affiliation	Language	PDF
Bradford L. Chamberlain, Sung-Eun Choi, Martha Dumler, David Iten Tom Hildebrandt, John Koenig, Vassily Litvinov Greg Titus, Casey Battaglino, Brandon Holt, Jeff Kealser, Rachel Sobel	Cray, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of Washington	Chapel
Olivier Tardieu:, David Grove, Bard Bloom, David Cunningham, Benjamin Herta, Prabhanjan Kambadur, Vijay A. Saraswat, Avraham Shinnar, Mikio Takeuchi, Mandana Vaziri	IBM	X10
Masahiro Nakao, Hitoshi Murai, Takenori Shimosaka, Mitsuhisa Sato	University of Tsukuba, RIKEN	XcalableMP
Laxmikant V. Kale, Anshu Arya, Nikhil Jain, Akhil Langer, Jonathan Lifflander, Harshitha Menon, Xiang Ni, Yanhua Sun, Ehsan Totoni, Ramprasad Venkataraman, Lukasz Wesolowski	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	Charm++