National HPC Hackathon

Eligibility

• National HPC Hackathon is focused on the field of life sciences. Participants can choose the projects from life sciences. 
• The Hackathon is open to all research institutes and scientists/post-doc candidates associated with a research institute in India. 
• This is a team participation Hackathon. There should be minimum of 2 and maximum of 4 members in the team. Team members can be from multiple institutes. One person can be part of one team only. 
• The Hackathon has two phases - an idea qualification phase and the actual Hackathon itself (aka Hack phase where AWS resources will be provided for 7 days).
• The Idea phase is a qualification phase to the actual Hackathon where ideas will be solicited, and submissions will be shortlisted on certain selection criteria.
• It's an online Hackathon, you can participate from anywhere.
• The intellectual property of your solution belongs only to your team.

Idea Phase

• Participants need to submit an idea detailing a research computational workflow (inclusive of pre-processing, simulation/core-analyses, post-processing and visualization if applicable) which they have already run on-premise on CPU architectures only. Along with detailing the workflow itself, key metrics around performance of the workflow will also need to be defined. For example, time to results, throughput or absolute simulation performance (need not be extensive but these metrics need to be compared when running the workflow on the cloud). 
• The scale of the problem to be run on the cloud does not have to match the scale run on-premise but there needs to be a way to compare metrics for results of different scales of the problem. The simulation/core-analyses of the computational workflow needs to take advantage of HPC architectures. 
• Participants need to submit their ideas in the prescribed format (Download here) Participants will need to highlight some high-level details to increase throughput using parallel computing to execute their problem solving. 
• An expert group will shortlist teams for participation based on the idea and the approach to increase the throughput based on scale. 
• Chances of selection will be higher if the computational workflow are towards solving real-world problems where the problem is clearly defined.
• The Idea phase will start on Nov 01, 2021 at 10:00 AM IST and end on Nov 25, 2021 at 11:55 PM IST.

Hack Phase

• The Hack phase will start on Nov 29, 2021 at 10:00 AM IST and end on Dec 08, 2021 at 10:00 AM IST. Participants can work on the problem during this time period only. 

• The Hackathon will entail reproducing the research computational workflow with Intel on AWS and compare results to similar scale of the problem run on-premise. 
• Successful completion of the Hackathon has the minimum criterion of being able to run the partial or end-to-end workflow with Intel on AWS inclusive of pre-processing, simulation/core-analyses, post-processing, and visualization if applicable. Completing this minimum criterion will qualify the submission to compete with other submissions.
• To compete with other teams participating will require to further optimize their workflows using AWS HPC solutions and services. Optimizations done could be on costs, overall workflow performance, absolute performance of component phases, workflow throughput, details are below. Comparison needs to be made with baseline metrics with Intel on AWS or comparison to related on-premise measurements (scaled) to highlight the merit of the optimization.