Reproducibility report: Team SegFAUlt @ SCC 2016

Abstract

Abstract This publication is based on the reproducibility task of the 2016 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) at the Supercomputing Conference (SC) 2016, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The SCC is a 48 h non-stop supercomputing challenge, where teams from all over the world, consisting of six undergraduate students each, run and optimize real-world scientific workloads and applications. For the first time in 2016, one of the tasks was to reproduce the results of a scientific paper. Besides the software part of the competition the students also have to decide on a suitable hardware configuration and assemble their cluster on-site. The only limitation is the power limit of 3120 W. The reproducibility task, which is described in this publication, was based on the 2015 SC paper “A parallel connectivity algorithm for de Bruijn graphs in metagenomic applications” by Patrick Flick et al. presenting the first non-lossy parallel decomposition of metagenomic assembly. The students had to (i) report general information about the provided datasets, (ii) create similar graphs about communication and computation time to those in the original paper using their own results, (iii) compare them to conclusion of the thesis being reproduced and (iv) perform a strong scaling study on the dataset, including the generation of graphs comparable to the original ones.