HiPC 2016 Student Parallel Programming Challenge
Supported by Intel and Nvidia

Download Parallel Programming Challenge PDF Flyer   [PDF, 639KB]

Registration is now open. To participate in the challenge, please create an account and register here.

Competition Rules

• The challenge will be open only to full-time students enrolled in Indian institutions and universities.
• Each team must consist of 1 to 3 student participants and must consist of a faculty advisor from their institution.
• Contest will be held in two parallel and independent tracks.
  • Track A: Intel KNL architecture
  • Track B: NVidia GPU architecture.
• Each team may choose to register for one or both tracks.
• No person can register for two teams in a single track.
• The contest will be held over a period of 30 days. Timeline for which is give below.
• Submission acceptance and evaluation criteria:
  • All submissions must be team’s own work. Plagiarism will be dealt with utmost seriousness and will have serious consequences. We will follow the IEEE rules that apply to papers including adding authors to IEEE Prohibited Authors List Database. The decisions of track and program chairs in any such case will be final. All submissions will be vetted for plagiarism using MOSS MIT tool. Submissions which are found to be plagiarized will be rejected.
  • Functional correctness of the result is a must to be considered for further evaluation.
  • Scoring Metrics: Evaluation metrics will be made available along with challenge problem.

Competition Tracks

• The contest will have two parallel and independent tracks. First track will be for Xeon Phi based cluster (x86+Xeon Phi nodes interconnected via high speed network) and second track will consist of a high end node with a NVidia GPU.
• Student teams can submit to one or both tracks
• The submissions to each tracks will be evaluated independently and there will be no cross track comparison.

Submission Process

The challenge is divided into two stages. In the first stage, students may deploy and test their submission locally (on their machine or a cluster provided by their institute). After initial testing, in the second stage, each participating group will be given access to a cluster (see Important Dates below) to deploy and test their solutions in an environment similar to the one that will be used for final evaluations.

To participate in the challenge, one member from the team should register here. To do so, first create an account on the registration website, and then click “HiPC 2016 Parallel Programing Challenge” link on the left navigation bar to begin team registration.

Notes:

• Participation in the programming challenge is free and does not incur any registration fees.
• Registration for the programming challenge does not imply registration for the conference. After the final notification, each member of the team selected for presentation must register for the conference individually at regular conference rates. See here for details. The registration fees and other expenses will be reimbursed on-site.

Each participating team should submit the following:

• Source code and associated makefiles
• Instructions on compiling
• Output report of functionality correctness tests
• Performance measurement table (template will be provided)
• Technical report detailing software architecture, specific performance optimizations, etc. (4 pages, 2 column IEEE format)

All submissions will be vetted for plagiarism using MOSS MIT tool. Submissions which are found to be plagiarized will be rejected. Submission link will be posted soon.

Mentorship Program

A team of experts in high performance computing and parallel programming will be available to the students to guide them through the process of building scalable, robust parallel solutions. All questions should be posted in a public forum visible to all the participating teams and no private conversations will be allowed. All teams should adhere to the forum guidelines (to be posted soon); failure to do so might lead to disqualification.

Training Sessions (New!)

To introduce more students to parallel programming concepts and to encourage high quality submissions, both NVIDIA and Intel will host online training sessions for registered students, introducing the NVIDIA GPU and Intel KNL architecture respectively, along with the programming concepts, and development tools for each of the platforms. The sessions will be aimed towards providing an overview and development best practices for these systems.

Intel will host an online training session on Oct 17th, 2PM to 4PM IST. The session is open to all participants, but separate registration is required to attend webinar. Training materials and more information about the online sessions are available here   [PDF, 501KB].

NVIDIA has shared a number of training videos and materials at: http://nvlabs.qwiklab.com and is available for all registered participants. For more information please visit the programming challenge mentor forum.

Prizes

The top three teams will be invited to the HiPC 2016 conference in Hyderabad, India where they will have the opportunity to present their approach and solutions. In addition, these teams will be presented with prizes from NVIDIA and Intel for individual tracks at the HiPC conference.

First Prize :
₹ 30,000 or equivalent
Second Prize :
₹ 20,000 or equivalent
Third Prize :
₹ 10,000 or equivalent

Important Dates

The Student Parallel Programming Challenge has been postponed by about a month. More information will be posted soon.

Challenge Problem

Organization

For further details contact [email protected]

Sponsors