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Hewlett Packard Enterprise is one of the largest HPC and enterprise computing vendors in the world. The company was created as a result of a splitting of the venerable Hewlett Packard company into two parts: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and HP Inc.
HPE is focused on servers, storage, networking, and consulting for business and HPC markets. HPE is one of the largest players in HPC with 84 systems on the Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. In terms of performance share, HPE tops the list with its systems representing 18.6% total performance share.
While HPE and its predecessor HP have always played a large role in HPC, the company became even more prominent with the acquisition of HPC pioneer Silicon Graphics (SGI) in in 2016. But HPE’s biggest move in HPC happened in 2019 when they purchased supercomputing leader Cray. These acquisitions have immeasurably strengthened HPE’s advantages in the HPC market while fueling innovative new products and services.
HPE will be delivering the first exascale systems in the United States with the Aurora system at Argonne National Laboratory, the Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the El Capitan system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Guest Commentator Mike Woodacre: Mike is an HPE Fellow and the company’s CTO of HPC and MCS. In the interview, he talks about how the competition strikes a chord with him because he’s the first one in his family to complete his education. We also talk about the current competition standings and what’s ahead for the teams.
HPE Shocks Competition - In a Good Way
The 2022 Winter Classic Student Cluster Competition is a grueling eight week marathon, combining HPC education and cutthroat competition as student teams optimize real-world HPC benchmarks and apps on mentor provided supercomputers. This competition is unique in that it exclusively features Historically Black Colleges and Universities along with Hispanic Serving Institutions, all competing for the 2022 Winter Classic Invitational Overall Championship, which is sponsored by Microsoft Azure.
Our vehicle for providing updates on the competition is the "2022 Winter Classic Invitational Student Cluster Competition Studio Update Show" (22WCISCCS), a fast moving talk show that takes a Monday Night Football-like approach to covering the event. Addison Snell and Dan Olds of Intersect360 Research host the show and bring on special guest commentators from time to time.
The latest show featured Justin Hotard, General Manager of HPC and AI at HPE. The company is one of the competition mentors, hosting the twelve student teams on HPE clusters, and teaching them how to run the HPCG and LINPACK benchmarks. You can see the results from that part of the competition here and learn about the HPE mentoring process here.
Near the end of the show, Justin Hotard dropped a bombshell on Addison and Dan that left them flummoxed. One feature of the Winter Classic competitions is the Brueckner Award, a scholarship award given to outstanding participants in the competition. This year, Intersect360 Research is giving a $1,000 scholarship to one student on each of the twelve teams. Well, that was the case until we interviewed Justin....
The interview was going great. We discussed the competition, broke down the leaderboard, and talked about the need for new talent in HPC/AI. Then, as we were closing out the show, Justin made his big announcement.
First, HPE is adding $12,000 to the Brueckner Award scholarship fund - doubling the scholarship award for one student on each team to $2,000. And then....he upped the ante even more by adding an additional $500 for each team PERSONALLY to the scholarship fund. This makes each individual scholarship worth $2,500....wow.
Everybody talks about getting more students interested in HPC careers. They also talk about expanding the diversity in HPC. But not so many actually put their money where their mouth is when the rubber meets the road. HPE and Justin Hotard just did exactly that.