Experience Report ISC24

After extensive preparations in the last couple weeks with only very little free time we were ready to leave our mark at the onsite competition of ISC24 in Hamburg, Germany. Motivated and fully energized we made our way to Hamburg, enjoying an luckily uneventful trip with time for some last preparations.

After arriving in Hamburg, we checked in and enjoyed a nice dinner, before returning to our hotel rooms and watching Nemo rock the ESC 2024. The next day, it was cluster preparation day. We took an S-Bahn from our hotel to the Hamburg congress center, which is nicely located next to the train station "Dammtor" and the huge park "Planten un Blomen". This year, for the first time, the student cluster competition got it's own hall at ISC. The room was filled with eight booths hosting the this years in-person teams. After quickly locating our booth and having a quick chat with our booth neighbors from Edinburgh, Hussein came and we started to unpack Sbrinz from it's transport box.

Having found a suitable place for Sbrinz we began connecting all nodes to the local network and power supply. Luckily, this time the setup was quite straightforward, without any major issues. In the early evening, we were ready to start the nodes and do some first benchmarks. Before we ended the day, we got a test run for all the benchmarks and applications and were ready to start the competition the next day.

After arriving in the booth the next day, we noticed that the temperature was much higher inside, leading us to worry about overshooting the power-limit due to increased cooling. Luckily, this was not the case and we managed some very good HPL runs, nudging the power limit of 6kW, but nevery crossing it and achieving over 230 TFlop/s. We also ran HPCG and HPCC, where the first ran well and the later had some issues; for the next competition we will look into HPCC more closely.

The 2nd and 3rd days of the competition were filled with running the three applications and this years mystery application openLB. First, we worked and submitted CONQUEST, a large-scale DFT solver, and Neko, a fluid-dynamics simulator. The next day, we focused on fixing some unforeseen issues with RegCM while some team members worked on compiling the mystery application on our backup cluster piora. Finally we fixed the issues with RegCM and submitted it. The rest of the time we worked on openLB which we ran on GPU and submitted it successfully, but with lower performance than hoped for.

Now the competition was over, and the only thing left for us to do was to enjoy the last day of the conference before the award ceremony. We met many interesting people and had some great conversations. Later that day there was the award ceremony, where we were awarded the 3rd place in the in-person competition. Happy with the result we starting packing the cluster fo r shipment back and enjoyed the last evening in Hamburg! All in all, ISC2024 was a great experience, where we had a lot of fun, learned a lot and met a lot of great people!