General

General questions

Is the HPC Challenge Class 2 Award partly a subjective beauty contest?

Yes.

Is there a written specification of the HPC Challenge?

Yes, in PDF format.

How big a system should I run on?

As big as you can. However, the judges do understand that the largest machines are difficult to get time on for this kind of activity.

Are submissions in higher level languages allowed?

Yes. In fact, higher level language submissions are strongly encouraged.

Are factors other than code size (i.e. software lines of code) important?

Yes. HPC Challenge Class 2 is 50% performance and 50% elegance which includes code size, readability, required effort and expertise of the implementation.

I have a very elegant approach for wrapping existing high performance parallel libraries, can I submit?

Yes. However, the judges are very interested in how your environment enables parallel computing, which includes how parallelism and data layout are expressed and used to implement HPC Challenge.

Can I use serial libraries like BLAS or FFTW?

Yes.

Must all relevant libraries be in the public domain?

No.

What is code size of the HPC Challenge reference implementation?

The relevant HPC Challenge code size are as follows (approximately):

Benchmark	HPL	RandomAccess	STREAM	FFT	PTRANS	DGEMM
Framework	2874	730	104	619	1131	66
Parallel	8800	938	329	787	1130	118
Serial	2109	125	329	747	105	118
Total	13783	1793	762	2153	2366	302

Must I use the HPC Challenge software framework for running my code?

No. But having similar configuration and reporting capabilities is a plus.

Are there any example submissions?

So far we have one in Python.

Do I have to resubmit my previous submission?

For Class 1: no (if nothing has changed in your system since your previous submission). For Class 2: yes (even if nothing has changed from your previous submission).

In other words, winning submission in Class 1 from previous year is still a winning submission for this year's edition unless a better result is submitted or the system that achieved the winning result has changed. Last year's winning submission for Class 2 may win this year's competition but will not do it automatically, it has to be resubmitted.