Team Quokka is a consortium of several universities in Australia. This is their second SC tourney, and they’ve brought a completely new team to the New Orleans battle.
First, I need to dispel a nasty rumor. The Aussie coach probably did not fire everyone on the 2014 team because they didn’t win the competition. She’s a much nicer person than that, according to, well, her.
In the video we discuss a wide range of topics with the team, including how hard it is to balance cluster competition training with their regular class work. I told them that they need to let all of the classwork go. It just gets in the way of clustering greatness.
We also see a fantastic example of the fine art of scapegoating and counter-scapegoating. It’s highlighted in the video, starting around the 3:15 mark.
There’s a student on the Aussie team who claims to be so steeped in the cluster arts that if the organizers gave him a potato, he could compile it and get some damned good results. Now that’s impressive. Gotta love that.
We didn’t get to talk to Team HUST (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China) on this round of interviews; they were extremely busy when we were making our initial rounds. We also missed out on an interview with Team Taiwan (National Tsing Hua University) due to a technical problem on our part, but we catch up with them later.
In our next set of articles, we’ll be checking in with the teams mid-competition. Stay tuned…
Posted In: Latest News, SC 2014 New Orleans
Tagged: supercomputing, Student Cluster Competition, HPC, iVEC, SC 2014, Meet the teams, pawsey