Coding Illini claim championship title at SC14

UPDATE 11/20/2014: The Coding Illini triumphed over the Korean team in the final match. The team donated the grand prize $26,000 to the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

UPDATE 11/20/2014: The Coding Illini beat Europe and will now go on to battle the Korean team for the championship at 1:30 pm.

UPDATE 11/18/2014: The Coding Illini were victorious in their first match vs. the Latin American team. They now await the results of the competition between the European and Chinese teams and will face the winner on Thursday. Nov. 20.

Coding Illini—a team composed of NCSA staff and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer science graduate students—will make a return appearance in the second annual Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge (PUCC) at SC14 in New Orleans, November 17-20. 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.

Placing second in last year’s competition, Coding Illini is more determined than ever to bring home the title. Join NCSA in cheering Coding Illini to victory, starting with their first match against SC3 for Super Computación y Calculo Cientifico (representing Brazil, Columbia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Venezuela) from 4-4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, November 18, at the Intel Parallel Universe Theater, Booth #1315.

Coding Illini team:

• Simon Garcia De Gonzalo: This 3rd-year Computer Science PhD student 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 4th-year Computer Science PhD student 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 Computer Science 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 post-doctoral research associate at NCSA, he is involved with Blue Waters Advanced User Support team. Andriy received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2011 from the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
• Omar Padron: 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, Omar’s 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 will once again host the trivia and coding portions of the Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge. Follow the team’s progress through NCSA Twitter (@NCSAatIllinois), Facebook (NCSAatIllinois), and Instagram (NCSAatIllinois) and using the hashtag #codingillini.

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