AHUG Hackathon: Cloud Hackathon for Arm-based HPC

Week of July 12th, 2021

Please note: that this event will be held in a digital fashion.

    AWS HPC Hackathon Logo

    See the recap for this event here and all the updated codes at our Github repo.

    The Arm HPC User Group (AHUG) announces the latest Arm HPC hackathon in collaboration with Arm and AWS. A week long interactive, and competitive, hackathon addressing HPC application porting and optimizing in the cloud.

    We now invite teams to participate in this competitive hackathon for the chance to win some serious goodies. A-HUG will be awarding an Apple M1 MacBook to each member of the team (max. 4 people) that moves the needle the furthest.

    Teams will undertake application porting and performance tuning of key HPC applications using virtual clusters on the AWS cloud – powered by their Arm Neoverse-N1 based Graviton2 processor. Using the Spack package manager teams will have to control the installation of their codes – and tune compiler, library and optimization flag choice to ensure a robust and performance tuned installation. Teams must then undertake performance and scalability studies and to compare against other processor architectures. Amassing points for successful builds, tests, performance analysis and tuning – the team with the most points will take the prizes.

    Each team will have its own pre-built AWS clusters with Graviton2 c6gn EC2 instances and with x86-based instances for comparing results. Contributions that focus on getting a code to build and run successfully will count towards the goal as they will push the community forward. However, it’s what you do to utilize the hardware to extract performance that will make the most difference for your team. The Graviton2 instances all have 64 cores per node, dual SIMD 128-bit units, and over 200 GB/s of peak memory bandwidth. They also have 100 Gbit/s networking with the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) to support efficient MPI communications.

    The pre-built AWS clusters will come with ready-to-use development tools and optimized libraries from Arm and others for porting, running, and benchmarking the selected code(s). Teams will need to provide realistic inputs and data for test cases, and measure how a code performs in both single-node and multiple-node runs. Points will be awarded for every successful code-build and test case, and the number of points earned will increase for performance improvements. Spack recipe improvements will go upstream, and test-cases and workloads will go to a public GitHub repo where all the artifacts will get a DOI so you can reference them in a paper.

    Teams will also be assigned a mentor, and have guidance from a community of technology specialists from within AWS and Arm to enable them to get the most out of this experience.

     

    Team Registration:

    Please enter via this Google Form to register your team. These teams will then be contacted upon registration close.

     

    AHUG Hackathon Timeline

    • Registration Opens: May 11th
    • Registration Closes: June 25th
    • Hackathon: Week commencing July 12th 2021