The DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) Program and HPCWire are pleased to announce the second annual HPC Challenge Award Competition (www.hpcchallenge.org).

The goal of the competition is to focus the HPC community's attention on a broad set of HPC hardware and HPC software capabilities that are necessary to effectively use HPC systems.

The core of the HPC Challenge Award Competition is the HPC Challenge benchmark suite developed by the University of Tennessee under the DARPA HPCS program with inputs from a wide range of organizations around the world (see http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/). The Competition will focus on four of the most challenging benchmarks in the suite:

• Global HPL
• Global RandomAccess
• Global STREAM (Triad)
• Global FFT

There will be two classes of awards.

Class 1: Best Performance (4 awards)

Best performance on the base or optimized run submitted to the HPC Challenge website.  The benchmarks to be judged are: Global HPL, Global RandomAccess, Global STREAM (Triad) and Global FFT. The prize will be $500 plus a certificate for the best of each. Entries that are already in the HPC Challenge database need not be resubmitted.

Class 2: Most Productivity

Most "elegant" implementation of one or more of the HPC Challenge benchmarks with special emphasis being placed on: Global HPL, Global RandomAccess, Global STREAM (Triad) and Global FFT. This award would be weighted 50% on performance and 50% on code elegance/clarity/size.  Both will be determined by an evaluation committee. At least 3 of the 4 benchmarks must be implemented.

For this award, the implementer must submit to hpcc-awards@cs.utk.edu (by October 27th) a short description of: the implementation, the performance achieved, lines-of-code, and the actual source code of their implementation. The evaluation committee will select a set of finalists who will be invited to give a short presentation at the HPC Challenge Award BOF at SC2006.   This presentation will be judged by the evaluation committee to select the winner. The prize will be $1500 plus a certificate for this award and may be split among the "best" entries. (Last years entries must be resubmitted, they will not carry over automatically.)

The awards will be presented at the HPC Challenge Award BOF at SC2006 and the prizes are sponsored by HPCWire.

HPC Challenge Awards Evaluation Committee

David Bailey, LBNL NERSC
Jack Dongarra (Co-Chair), U of Tennessee
Jeremy Kepner (Co-Chair), MIT Lincoln Lab
David Koester, MITRE
Bob Lucas, ISI
Rusty Lusk, Argonne National Lab Piotr Luszczek, U of Tennessee
John McCalpin, IBM Austin
Rolf Rabenseifner, HLRS, Stuttgart
Daisuke Takahashi, U of Tsukuba