The tale of the ISC18 Student Cluster Competition was a tale of the haves and the have-nots. Some teams had a large number of nodes with an equally large number of accelerators. Other teams, well, not so much. But, in the end, as usual, hardware did not dictate the final results, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Fire up your ganderers and take a gander at the table below:
As you can see, the total node count varies between two and twelve. Typically the teams with the bare minimum nodes are primarily shooting for LINPACK glory, while the teams with more nodes are looking to go for the overall championship.
You’ll also notice a discrepancy when it comes to accelerators. Some teams, like the powerhouse Tsinghua and ShanghaiTech, brought 16 Nvidia V100s to turbocharge their clusters. Several teams brought a solid load of 8-12 V100s, while a few teams didn’t have any. They either didn’t have the right contacts at Nvidia or couldn’t get over the hump in borrowing some GPUs from them.
However, like I said above, the sheer amount of hardware doesn’t make or break a team when it comes to these competitions. You’ll see what I mean when we get to the point where we’re talking scores.
Next up, we’re going to meet up team up close and personal using the miracle of video. Stay tuned….
Posted In: Latest News, ISC 2018 Frankfurt