Teams Announced for SC14 Charity Parallel Computing Challenge

Intel announced today the competition schedule and the final selection of teams who will participate in the second annual Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge (PUCC) at SC14 in New Orleans, November 17-20. Each team will play for a charitable organization to whom Intel will donate $26,000 in recognition of the 26th anniversary of the Supercomputing conference. The 2014 PUCC will kick off on Monday evening, November 17 at 8 p.m. during the SC14 exhibition hall Opening Gala with The Gaussian Elimination Squad facing the Invincible Buckeyes. Additional matches will be held Tuesday through Thursday of the SC14 conference with the final match scheduled for Thursday afternoon at 1:30 p.m. Mike Bernhardt and James Reinders will once again be hosting the challenge.

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Here’s what some of the team captains had to say on the upcoming challenge:

• Mike Showerman, captain of the team who placed second last year, said he hopes this year’s team goes all the way to the championship. “The Coding Illini will be even fiercer this year and will take every opportunity to bring the title home.”
• Examen Team Captain David Horak with IT4Innovations humorously suggested “We want to check whether we finally reached the state when bachelor students surpass us in HPC knowledge.”
• Another team with a sense of humor is the group from Seoul National University who returns as The Brilliant Dummies. Team Captain Wookeun Jung, a graduate PhD student, says “Our team name is TBD, The Brilliant Dummies, because we are brilliant enough to solve the complicated HPC problems, and dummies that only can solve those HPC problems. Of course, whether we would be brilliant in the competition or not is TBD.”
• When asked how the Linear Scalers, would prepare, Kalyan “Kumar” Kumaran, who is manager of Performance Engineering and Data Analytics in the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility said “Pre-competition stretching, and coffee. We will start memorizing sections from James Reinders’ books.”
• Karen Tomko, Scientific Applications Group Manager at the Ohio Supercomputer Center and captain of the Invincible Buckeyes offered “We’ll do our homework for the trivia, brush up on the parallel constructs, look at some Fortran codes, and make sure we have at least one vi user on the team.”
• Gilberto Díaz, infrastructure chief of the supercomputer center at Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS), assembled a Latin Americans team called SC3 for Super Computación y Calculo Cientifico. He asserted “We would like to promote and develop more widespread awareness and use of HPC in our region. In addition to the excitement of participating in the 2014 event, our participation will help us to prepare students of master and PhD programs to better understand the importance of code modernization as well as preparing them to compete in future competitions.” Gilbert has since passed on the responsibility for the team captain to Carlos Barrios, Professor at UIS.
• Georg Hager, team captain for last year’s champion Gaussian Elimination Squad and senior research scientist at Germany’s Erlangen Regional Computing Center, said “The PUCC is about showing knowledge and experience in the field of HPC. This is exactly what we are trying to build in the German institutions that were part of the team at SC13, and so we are eagerly waiting for our next chance to show that we have done well on that.”