KU Supercomputing Club Places in 2024 Single Board Cluster Competition
Highlights of KSC's achievements in the 2024 SBCC.
Exciting News from KU Supercomputing Club!
We are thrilled to share some exciting news from the KU Supercomputing Club! In the 2024 Single Board Cluster Competition (SBCC), KSC achieved remarkable success, showcasing dedication and expertise in high-performance computing (HPC).
SBCC is an opportunity for teams from around the world to showcase their skills in building and optimizing single-board computer clusters—essentially, budget mini-supercomputers—using the latest technologies. Participants are required to run the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) and High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG) benchmarks, along with real-world HPC applications on their clusters. The cluster must not exceed a power limit of 250 Watts and $6,000 MSRP.
Highlights of KSC’s Achievements
- First Place in the HPCG benchmark category, with an outstanding score of 25.182 GFLOPS!
- Second Place overall in the competition!
KSC used this competition as an opportunity to learn from other teams, gaining insights into how they built and optimized their clusters, which will help improve KSC’s performance in future competitions.
Financial Support
Generous support for KSC was provided by:
- KU EECS Department
- Mathematical Methods & Interdisciplinary Computing Center (MMICC)
- Institute for Information Sciences (I2S)
Such support allowed KSC to construct a high-performance cluster consisting of:
- 5 Orange Pi 5+ boards
- 17 Orange Pi 5 boards
- A TP-Link TL-SG10124 Gigabit Ethernet Switch
- Several other hardware components
The cluster boasts:
- 176 CPU cores divided across 22 compute nodes
- 16 GB of RAM per node
- An Arm Mali-G610 GPU for enhanced processing power
I2S also provided dedicated space for hosting the cluster, which KSC continues to maintain with the goal of handling real-world workloads from EECS students and researchers.
Future Plans
KSC intends to compete in SBCC next year and in similar HPC-related competitions. We look forward to recruiting more team members to join us on this exciting journey!
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Footnote
EECS News Post1