Background

Hackathon is amalgamation of two concepts: Hacking and Marathon. In traditional sense hackathon is an event where programmers and domain experts come together and indulge themselves into intense software development exercises under dedicated, specially designed environment to create a working model of a pre-conceived or an  abstract concept.  

Hackathon is a popular event in software industry mostly because, in hackathon members of the team gathers from diverse domain, no hierarchy of positions and everyone is with mission mode implementation attitude. Due to these factors transforming concepts to working implementation becomes faster with benefit of a great amount of learning that happens in a small amount of time. 

Unlike other hackathons, GPU Application Hackathon 2018 (GAH - 2018) has more specific and defined roadmap. Through this event, organizers intend to enable, upscale and improve the overall execution strategy of any specific module / algorithm / application  through rigorous brain storming, tweaking source code, modifying programming style, under the mentorship of a well regarded subject matter expert.    

Objective

GAH – 2018 gives a unique opportunity to participating teams to jumpstart their journey towards parallelization, acceleration or optimization of their existing application on GPUs using any preferred tools and technologies. Teams will be closely mentored, monitored and guided by expert from respective domain of the targeted application. Teams and experts would deliberate, decide and implement some of the most well-established parallelization and optimization techniques using GPU into their application source code.  At the end, each team should have significantly accelerated their code or get to know which steps to take next to continue working further on the same. 

Details

Selection Criteria

  • The software must be in runnable state producing consistent output.
  • Both sequential and parallel application is eligible. However parallel applications likely to achieve good scalability would be preferred. 
  • Application having HPC background would be given preferences. 
  • Open source, closed source or proprietary application are allowed.
  • Application having wide usability and impact are encouraged. 
  • It is preferable that each team have minimum of 3 and maximum of 6 members those are well versed with their application nature and source code structure. Collectively the team should know the application intimately from the perspective of programming and domain knowledge
  • Hackathon committee shall have final authority in selecting applications as per the suitability and nature of the proposals.

About This Event

  • This is a 5-day event - 1-day OpenACC introductory training followed by a 4-day hackathon.  
  • Selected teams will be assigned mentors and are expected to engage themselves into technical discussion / presentation / deliberation / code performance evaluation with their respective mentor prior to the event.
  • Participants will get access to compute cluster made available by C-DAC.
  • On the last day of Hackathon, every team must present their learnings and achievement as a technical report – one member of the team shall present it to all attendees during closing ceremony. These reports shall be shared with all partnering organization.
  • Based on agreement between mentor and the participants, further collaboration opportunities may be possible.

Disclaimers

  • IPR of the applications and any outcome resulting from this interaction, will stay with the respective original application developers, proposer or as defined by the existing licence policy of the software.
  • The usage of the system / infrastructure must solely be limited to and should be in alignment with the purpose of the event.

Benefits to Participants

  • Unique opportunity to get mentored for your application by well recognized domain experts across academia, research and industry from within and outside India.
  • Upgrading application performance within short span of time. 
  • Experimenting with your application on latest architectures of computing system.
  • New levels of performance of your code, time with experts, ability to run on supercomputers and unforgettable experience might bring you closer to a new paper or talk.
  • Potential opportunity to have further collaboration with mentors even after the event.
  • Certificate of participation.

Target Audience

The event is intended for current or prospective user groups of large hybrid CPU-GPU systems to send teams of 3 or 6 developers along with either (1) a (potentially) scalable application that could benefit from GPU acceleration, or (2) an application running on accelerators that needs optimization. 

Stay and Travel

Venue (Event & Accomodation) : IISER Pune

  • Registration and Participation in GAH-2018 are free. 
  • Please note that selected teams / members have to bear all of their travel related expenses. 
  • Participants would be provided free twin-sharing based accommodation; Accommodation would be provided from 16th September evening to 21st September evening, 2018. 
  • Participants would be provided free lunch, snacks and access to new generation GPU compute resources (users need to bring their own laptops to access the GPU compute nodes).

How to Apply

Please visit https://www.openacc.org/hackathons website and register your team under India hackathon event.

For more information please email to gah-2018@cdac.in 

About Partner Organizations

OpenACC

OpenACC.org is a non-profit organization founded to help scientists and researchers do more science and less programming by providing a high-level directives-based programming model for high performance computing. The charter of OpenACC.org is to develop and deliver the OpenACC specification, and to help educate and support scientists and researchers using or considering using OpenACC directives. The organization is run by academic and industry members in collaboration with OpenACC user community. More about OpenACC.org: https://www.openacc.org.

C-DAC

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is an autonomous Scientific Society under the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Government of India. Set up in 1988, as India’s national initiative for design, development and delivery of high performance computing (Supercomputer) systems and solutions based on parallel processing technology, C-DAC has over the years diversified its activities, transferring the expertise its acquired and technologies its developed in the high-end computing to develop and deploy advanced Information Technology (IT) based solutions in the key sectors of economy. More about C-DAC:   https://cdac.in.

NSM

National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) is a proposed plan by Government of India to empower India’s national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of high-performance computing facilities. These institutions would participate by using these facilities and develop applications of national relevance. The Mission also includes development of highly professional High Performance Computing (HPC) aware human resource for meeting challenges of development of these applications. The Mission implementation would bring supercomputing within the reach of the large Scientific & Technology community in the country and enable the country with a capacity of solving multi-disciplinary grand challenge problems. The Mission is being implemented and steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India. More avout NSM: https://nsmindia.in.

IISER Pune 

The Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Pune is a premier Institute dedicated to research and teaching in the basic sciences. It was established in 2006 by the Ministry of Human Resource Development. In 2012, it was declared as an Institute of National Importance by an Act of Parliament. As a unique initiative in science education in India, IISER Pune aims to be a Science University of the highest caliber devoted to both teaching and research in a totally integrated manner, with state-of-the-art research and high quality education, thus nurturing both curiosity and creativity. More about IISER Pune: www.iiserpune.ac.in.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined modern computer graphics and revolutionized parallel computing. More recently, GPU deep learning ignited modern AI — the next era of computing — with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world. More about NVIDIA: http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/.