Students rise to the green challenge Purdue University’s student Cluster Challenge team at the SC09 supercomputing conference in Portland, Oregon, was fast and green. And two Technology students were instrumental in the team’s success. David King, a senior in electrical and computer engineering technology, and Max Hapner, a senior in computer and information technology, were part of a seven-member team at the Cluster Challenge. The event pushes teams to run a set battery of benchmarking programs and working scientif ic applications as efficiently as possible. For the second consecutive year, the Purdue team won the award for getting the most done on the least amount of power. The team spent a lot of time during the setup phase of the event testing different configurations to see how they affected power consumption, Hapner said.
In part, that was to make sure the Purdue entry stayed under surprise power limits imposed by the competition’s organizers. But the students also were conscious of the issue of data-center power consumption, which has become a major concern and was one focus of the SC09 conference. King wrote a special program to monitor the power consumption of Purdue’s Cluster Challenge machine while teammate Charles Timko, a junior in computer science, visualized the data on a large-screen monitor. Purdue competed against teams from the University of Colorado, Arizona State University, and State University of New York at Stony Brook. Purdue’s team finished second to Stony Brook in the overall competition. Most members of the Purdue team were students in Jeff Evans’s high-performance computing class in the College of Technology. In addition, they spent up to 20 hours a week on the effort to prepare for the competition.
Meanwhile King, who will graduate this may, took advantage of another Cluster Challenge benefit: the SC09 jobs fair. “Take lots of resumes, you may have a job offer before you leave,” Evans advised the students. “That’s how highly Cluster Challenge team members are regarded.” Hapner believes a key part of his career advancement will be knowing at least something about how most things in a data center work. He said the Cluster Challenge was a good opportunity to expand his knowledge. The other Purdue team members were: Alex Miller, earth and atmospheric sciences; Michael Niksa, computer engineering; Michael Wleklinski, chemistry and statistics; and Alex Younts, computer science. ITaP and its research computing arm, the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, help sponsor the Purdue team.
Purdue Cluster Challenge team members Max Hapner, David King, Alex Younts, and Michael Niksa adjust Purdue’s entry in the supercomputing competition near the deadline for completing the processing of the simulated science data.
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