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Published on Monday, 05 December 2022 23:20

2022 Hack in the City 

The HPC in the City: Dallas Hackathon was held November 3rd - 6th, 2022, co-located with the SC22 conference. and went. Of the 72 registrants for the hackathon 46 were representatives of Minority Serving Institutions.  Student participants heard mentor pitch hack ideas the evening of November 3rd and chose the idea on which they wanted to work during the event. Final teams were made up of a mentor, co-mentor, and 2-5 students. From November 4th-6th, 2022 there were two(2) “check-ins” per day. Each check-in consisted of teams providing progress updates, as well as any challenges that collectively might be resolved by the whole group. Additionally, the check-ins included organizer-provided challenges that added a bit of fun to each session while helping the teams progress. On the evening of November 7th, teams presented their results. Each team delivered a Team/Project GitHub Repository Link with:

• Any generated source code with comments
• A PDF of the project presentation, detailing:
  • Team members
  • Use of HPC technology in the project
  • Description of how the hackathon project helps the Dallas/Ft. Worth and/or greater Texas community
• A custom README.md file with team and project information

After the final presentations, a series of equally ranked prizes were awarded including Viewer’s Choice Award, Judges Award, and HPC in the City Impact Award.

Team EcoLocation won the HPC in the City Impact Award.

The Impact award  goes to the team that creates something most valuable to the city of Dallas. EcoLocation’s challenge was to create a website that directly connects organizations with the workforce they’re looking to fund. The EcoLocation team site aimed to connect organizations, officials, educators, and people looking to enter career fields related to supporting environmental efforts in order to provide funding, education, and growth in those fields. The team completed this challenge by combining the following technologies: Node js, Express js, and XAMPP as well as the structure of a mySQL and PHP connection. The final site is being hosted via a Linux virtual machine on Google Cloud.

One team mentor was Dr. Alfred Watkins of Morehouse College. This was his third hackathon.  Mentor Dr. Will Mobley joined the TACC MultiModal Applications Team in June of 2022. He is currently a research associate focusing on Robust Decision Making under uncertainty and Geospatial Applied Machine Learning. Dr. Mobley shared during the Hackathon about the team’s win, “Congratulations guys! You did an awesome job!” Hackers were Khadar Coleman [ Morehouse College Computer Science] and Govnor Payne [University of Texas at Austin Computer Science].  Judges commented how the project positively impacted the Dallas community, enhanced use of funds, had a great user interface, and the wire frame diagram was very useful.

The Judges Award was presented to Team Genie.  

Cole McKnight of Omnibond Systems mentored Team Genie. Team members included Ibrahim Oluwajoba Adisa [Clemson University], Hunter Marquette [Elizabeth City State University, studyingComputer Science], and Diondre Deloatch [-Elizabeth City State University, studying  [Computer Science].

Team Genie’s goal was to design a LAMMPS Granular Chute Simulation showing grains flowing into a grain silo. To accomplish the goal the team employed HPC resources including Google Cloud, Cloudy Cluster HPC, Github, SLURM Scripts & MPI (to automatically launch CC nodes), LAMMPS Program (for simulation of grain flows), OVITO (for visualization of LAMMPS outputs), and Bash/CLI. Judges made their decision to award Team Genie based on tackling a very complex problem and using LAMMPS to solve a complicated problem involving physics using a novel technique.

Mr-Roger’s-20 minute neighborhood received the Viewer’s Choice Award. 

Mentors for this team included Edgar Garza and Pat Scherer, both from Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).  Adonay Sissay from Northwestern State University also assisted with the team mentoring.  Hackers included Marie Michelle Ishimwe [Methodist University, studying Computer Science], Kevin Chen [University of Maryland, studying Computer Science], and Carlos Iglesias [University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez, studying Computer Science and Engineering].

The team built an evaluation tool in Python using Google Maps python library to find the places within a 20 minute walk or bike ride. These places included hospitals, pharmacies, grocery stores, all basic need providers.

The team mentors were really pleased  watching the team work together.  “You all did wonderful! The presentation looked awesome and the demo looked sweet!” was the shared sentiment from Mr-Roger's mentors. One team member shared, “This was my first hackathon and I’m so happy with this first experience!”

Organizer's Award Goes to Zachare Lofton

At the end of the hackathon, all students skillfully dealt with challenges and  endured. One hacker was identified as making an extraordinary and exceptional effort.  The organizers acknowledged  Zachare Lofton [Morehouse College] for his character and effort with the Organizer’s Award.  

The success of the 2022 HPC in the City: Dallas is a direct result of the support of the science gateways community.  This includes community members who served as:

• Mentors - Students, Faculty/Teachers, Staff, Researchers, Subject Matter Experts
• Co-Mentors*/Staff - Faculty/Teachers, Staff, Researchers, Subject Matter Experts
• Judges - Faculty/Teachers, Staff, Researchers, Subject Matter Experts
• Speakers/Supporters - Subject Matter Experts, Community Members

You can watch the 2022 Hack in the City presentations here. Congratulations again to all the teams!