News & press releases

LEGaTO collaborates in the 3rd edition of BSC/UPC Hackathon, focusing on energy efficiency in High Performance Computing

The 3rd Annual BSC/UPC HPC Hackathon, co-organised by Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), will challenge participants with problems to solve in a limited time. The event will take place at UPC’s Campus Nord on 30 November 2018 from 10 am. The central theme of the hackathon will be Energy Efficiency in High Performance Computing and the call for participation is open until mid November.

 

The hackathon is addressed to university students or recently graduated PhDs with good coding skills — primarily in C and shell, but knowledge of other programming languages such as C++ and Python is recommended. The challenges will be divided into three main areas: GPU Computing, Parallel Programming and Software Security. This year’s hackathon has been organised in collaboration with the European project LEGaTO, a low energy software ecosystem for heterogeneous computing.

Leonardo Bautista‐Gómez, Senior Researcher at BSC and co-organiser of the hackathon, said: "This year we wanted to explore one of the most important challenges in High Performance Computing: energy efficiency. To achieve sustainable exascale computing, it is essential to develop software tools that can extract as much computing power from the hardware as possible, using the lowest possible amount of energy."

"This task is at the heart of the European project LEGaTO, which collaborates on this year’s hackathon. The participants will have the opportunity to work with real codes used at BSC and develop energy-efficient techniques to improve performance and reduce power consumption," added Leonardo.

Participants will be given access to high-end machines with leading-edge technology and high-speed networks. Food and drink will be provided so that participants can focus on coding. Candidates will be evaluated on the performance of their solutions, the effectiveness, the quality of the code and their speed, with attractive prizes available for the winners.

More information:

Participation is not guaranteed. The committee will select the participants (40).