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SC14 Parallel Universe Computing Challenge Match #1: The Squad smashes the “Invincible Buckeyes”

At 8pm Central Time today, the Gaussian Elimination Squad fought their first round of the Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge against the “Invincible Buckeyes,” representing the Ohio Supercomputing Center and Ohio State University, at the SC14 conference. I have to admit that I needed to look up “buckeye” in the dictionary, where I learned that “buckeye” is a tree (going by the scientific name “Aesculus“, also known as the “chestnut”) as well as a nickname for residents of the U.S. state of Ohio. Nice pun, but no match for the kick-ass, brilliancy-radiating nom de guerre of the German team!

Just as last year, this is a single-elimination tournament, with eight teams fighting one-on-one in seven matches. Each match consists of two parts. The first is a trivia round, with questions about computing, parallelism, the history of supercomputing, and the SC conference series. The faster you select the correct answer (out of four), the more points you collect. After the trivia we had a slight advantage, but there was no reason to be over-confident. In the second part, the coding challenge, we had ten minutes to parallelize and optimize a piece of code (that we hadn’t seen before, of course). In a team effort without equal we managed to get a mind-boggling 240x performance speedup compared to the original version on the Intel Xeon Phi! The Buckeyes were stuck at something like 6x. Hence, this round goes to The Squad, and we are eagerly looking forward to the semi-finals on Wednesday. 

Team members for “Gaussian Elimination Squad” now official

In case you haven’t heard it yet: The “Gaussian Elimination Squad” will defend their title in the “Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge” at SC14 in New Orleans. We have finally put together the team! Here it is:

  • Christian Terboven (University of Aachen IT Center)
  • Michael Ott (Leibniz Supercomputing Center)
  • Guido Juckeland (Technical University of Dresden)
  • Michael Kluge (Technical University of Dresden)
  • Christian Iwainsky (Technical University of Darmstadt)
  • Jan Treibig (Erlangen Regional Computing Center)
  • Georg Hager (Erlangen Regional Computing Center)

The teams all get their share of attention now at Intel’s website. AFAIK they are still looking for submissions, so take your chance to get thrashed! Figuratively speaking, of course.

Blaze 2.1 has been released

Blaze is an open-source, high-performance C++ math library for dense and sparse arithmetic based on Smart Expression Templates. Just in time for ISC’14, Blaze 2.1 has been released. The focus of this latest release is the improvement and extension of the shared memory parallelization capabilities: In addition to OpenMP parallelization, Blaze 2.1 now also enables shared memory parallelization based on C++11 and Boost threads.  Additionally, the underlying architecture for the parallel execution and automatic, context-sensitive optimization has been significantly improved. This not only improves the performance but also allows for an efficient parallel handling of computations involving block-structured vectors and matrices.

All of the Blaze documentation and code can be downloaded at https://code.google.com/p/blaze-lib/.

Bill Gropp on “Engineering for Performance in High Performance Computing”

At the PASC14 conference in Zurich, Bill Gropp gave a great talk on Performance Engineering, the way it should be done. 100% along the lines of what we try to teach people in our tutorials! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sadfSARXSC0

Gaussian Elimination Squad wins Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge at SC13!

PUCC-bracket

Final team bracket for the Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge

We’ve made it! The final round against the “Coding Illini” team, comprising members from the University of Illinois and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), took place on Thursday, November 21, at 2pm Mountain Time. We were almost 30% ahead of the other team after the trivia, and managed to extend that head start in the coding challenge, which required the parallelization of a histogram computation. This involved quite a lot of typing, since OpenMP does not allow private clauses and reductions for arrays in C++. My request for a standard-sized keyboard was denied so we had to cope with a compact one, which made fast typing a little hard. As you can see in the video, a large crowd had gathered around the Intel booth to cheer for their teams.

Remember, each match consisted of two parts: The first was a trivia challenge with 15 questions about computing, computer history, programming languages, and the SC conference series. We were given 30 seconds per question, and the faster we logged in the correct answer (out of four), the more points we got. The second part was a coding challenge, which gave each team ten minutes to speed up a piece of code they had never seen before as much as possible. On top of it all, the audience could watch what we were doing on two giant screens.

The Gaussian Elimination Squad

The Gaussian Elimination Squad: (left to right) Michael Kluge, Michael Ott, Joachim Protze, Christian Iwainsky, Christian Terboven, Guido Juckeland, Damian Alvarez, Gerhard Wellein, and Georg Hager (Image: S. Wienke, RWTH Aachen)

In the first match against the Chinese “Milky Way” team, the code was a 2D nine-point Jacobi solver; an easy task by all means. We did well on that, with the exception that we didn’t think of using non-temporal stores for the target array, something that Gerhard and I had described in detail the day before in our tutorial! Fortunately, the Chinese had the same problem and we came out first. In the semi-final against Korea, the code was a multi-phase lattice-Boltzmann solver written in Fortran 90. After a first surge of optimism (after all, LBM has been a research topic in Erlangen for more than a decade) we saw that the code was quite complex. We won, but we’re still not quite sure whether it was sheer luck (and the Korean team not knowing Fortran). Compared to that, the histogram code in the final match was almost trivial apart from the typing problem.

The back image on our shirts

According to an enthusiastic spectator we had “the nerdiest team name ever!”

After winning the challenge, the “Gaussian Elimination Squad” proudly presented a check for a $25,000 donation to the benefit of the Philippines Red Cross.

I think that all teams did a great job, especially when taking into account the extreme stress levels caused by the insane time limit, and everyone watching the (sometimes not-so-brilliant) code that we wrote! It’s striking that none of the US HPC leadership facilities made it to the final match – they all dropped out in the first round (see the team bracket above).

The Gaussian Elimination Squad represented the German HPC community, with members from RWTH Aachen (Christian Terboven and Joachim Protze), Jülich Supercomputing Center (Damian Alvarez), ZIH Dresden (Michael Kluge and Guido Juckeland), TU Darmstadt (Christian Iwainsky), Leibniz Supercomputing Center (Michael Ott), and Erlangen Regional Computing Center (Gerhard Wellein and Georg Hager). Only four team members were allowed per match, but the others could help by shouting advice and answers they thought were correct.

 

Gaussian Elimination Squad to fight in “SC13 Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge”

It seems that Intel’s marketing division has some money to spend for charity – $25,000 to be exact. To make its spending as entertaining as possible, they have set up a stage show at SC13 in Denver, Colorado (Nov 17-22, 2013): The “Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge.”

Eight teams from the US, Europe, China, and Korea are going to fight in a three-round sudden death tournament. The German team comprises members from Aachen, Darmstadt, Jülich, Dresden, Garching, and Erlangen, and happens to be led by me. According to the rules each match will be 30 minutes, in which the teams have to answer questions and optimize code. The audience will have the chance to answer questions and win prizes, too! So if you happen to be at SC13 and can spare the time, drop by the Intel booth (#2701, see floor plan) and see us fight! See the link above for the schedule.

Honoring one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, the German team has chosen a peculiar war name: The “Gaussian Elimination Squad.” We will take on “Team Milky Way” from China in our first match on Tuesday, Nov 19th, 11:00am. We do not know why they have picked the name of a popular chocolate bar 😉 but probably it was in anticipation of what’s going to happen to them:

Milky Way before processing

Milky Way before elimination

Milky Way after processing

Milky Way after elimination

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now you know why we call ourselves the “Gaussian Elimination Squad.”