SMERSH! That was the sound of the Student Cluster Competition LINPACK record being shattered – in a huge way. How huge? Really huge. As in more than doubled. Continue reading
SC16: Meet the Teams
So who are the kids competing in the SC16 Student Cluster Competition this year? What are their hopes, their dreams – what makes them tick? Why did they travel all the way to Salt Lake City to chase the Cluster Crown? (There is no actual crown, but there should be, right?)
In these videos, we get to know the kids and get a personal feel for each of the teams. Sort of like the Olympics when they do the “up-close-and-personal” features – but with lower production values, 40 per cent less tedium, and no weepy back stories. Continue reading
SC16 Configs: FPGAs join tussle; GPUs back with a vengeance
This is the most widely varied and exciting set of student cluster competition systems I’ve seen since the competition began ten years ago. We have fourteen different teams and fourteen different takes on which system configuration is best suited to take on the applications in this year’s competition. Continue reading
SC16: Tenth Kid Cluster Comp Kicks Off
The tenth annual Student Cluster Competition kicked off Monday at the SC16 conference here in Salt Lake City, Utah. This is a competition for the ages, with some wildly divergent hardware configurations, more teams than ever before (14), plus some special features that are sure to throw the budding HPCers for a loop. Continue reading
ISC’16: All the results, all the analysis, all the glory
The results are in for the International Supercomputing Conference High Performance (ISC) 2016 Student Cluster Competition, and we’ve analyzed them senseless.
First, the big headlines: the ever-plucky Team South Africa won their third ISC Student Cluster Competition championship last week at ISC’16. Team Tsinghua was following closely behind the South Africans but had to settle for second place. Team Shanghai finished in third, with Team USTC nipping at their heels from fourth place. Continue reading
Mystery Apps Can’t Stump ISC’16 Cluster Kids
One of the most interesting parts of the ISC Student Cluster competitions is their inclusion of “mystery” applications and tasks. These are challenges that the students can’t prepare for. They can only rely on their training and wits to bring them through. Continue reading
ISC’16: LINPACK Record Falls Again
The ISC (International Supercomputing Conference) Student Cluster Competition once again cements its reputation as the place where LINPACK records go to fall. Last week we saw not one, but two teams top the current 12.03 TFLOPS record that was established at the ASC16 spring competition. Continue reading
Meet the ISC’16 Student Cluster Teams
It’s time for our traditional video look at each of the teams in the ISC High Performance 2016 Student Cluster Competition. Where to begin? Let’s take it alphabetically this time… Continue reading
ISC’16 System Configurations: All over the map
This year’s ISC’16 Student Cluster Competition boasts the most diverse set of hardware in the near 10-year history of student cluster competitions. Student teams are running three different system architectures (x86, ARM, and Power) in both traditional and hybrid (hardware accelerated) forms.
The configurations of these systems are all over the map, as is typical in these competitions. CPU core counts range from 56 on the low end to more than 800 for the ARM teams. Let’s take a closer look at the team configs… Continue reading
Nice cluster. What can you do with it? The ISC’16 Apps
Your correspondent wrote this blog during the action at the ISC’16 Student Cluster Competition arena, located on the trade show floor of the Messe Frankfurt conference center. So far, everything is going well for the teams – everyone has their hardware and finished their basic setup over the weekend.
Yesterday was when the rubber met the road. Continue reading