Coding Illini Claim Championship Title at SC14

The Coding Illini triumphed over the Korean team in the final match at SC'14 held in New Orleans last month. The team donated the grand prize $26,000 to the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

The Coding Illini were teh champions in the Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge at SC14.

Coding Illini—a team composed of National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) staff and University of Illinois computer science graduate students—made a return appearance in the second annual Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge (PUCC) at SC14. The Challenge tests knowledge of parallel computing topics, SC history, and coding skills, with each team competing for the grand prize of $26,000—in recognition of the 26th anniversary of the Supercomputing conference—to be donated to charity.

The winning Coding Illini team included:

• Simon Garcia De Gonzalo: This third-year CS PhD student’s interests include parallel computing on HPC and accelerator technology, code portability for HPC applications, and heterogeneous intra-node scheduling with a special focus on leveraging different types of accelerator technology on heterogeneous clusters. He is a member of the IMPACT group at Illinois.
• Ana Gainaru: This fourth-year CS PhD student’s interests include parallel and distributed computing on HPC systems, with a special focus on resilience/fault tolerance. Her research aims to discover to what extent online failure prediction is a possibility at petascale/exascale and what are the challenges in achieving an effective fault prevention mechanism for current and future HPC systems.
• Phil Miller: A CS PhD student in the Illinois Parallel Programming Laboratory, he is interested in asynchronous parallel algorithms and dynamic and adaptive runtime systems. He is a core developer of the Charm++ parallel programming system and also a senior engineer at Charmworks Inc.—aiming to bring Charm++ to the broader commercial HPC marketplace.
• Andriy Kot: A postdoctoral research associate at NCSA, he is involved with Blue Waters Advanced User Support team. He received his PhD in computer science from the College of William and Mary in Virginia in 2011.
• Omar Padron: He is an NCSA research programmer and a member of the Science and Engineering Applications Support (SEAS) team for the Blue Waters petascale computing system. An applied mathematician by training and software developer by trade, his interests lie in the application of software engineering principles and analytical techniques in the advancement of HPC practice in science.
• Mike Showerman: With skills in clustered computing, systems management, monitoring and analysis, alternative computing architectures and interconnects, team captain Mike Showerman is a formidable foe.

Intel's James Reinders and The Exascale Report’s Mike Bernhardt hosted the trivia and coding portions of the Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge.