Texas is at SC10 with what looks to me to be the most elaborate booth of the SCC competition – at least in terms of artwork and theme. Their booth is festooned (or at least half-festooned) with “TACC to the Future” posters that play off the “Back to the Future” movies from the 1980s. TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center) is the lead technical (and probably spiritual) advisor to the Longhorn team.
Dell is holding down vendor sponsorship duties and has provided the team with shiny new cluster gear. They’re running nine two-socket Intel Westmere-fueled nodes – with each Westmere packing six cores for a total of 108 cores. Total system memory comes in at 432GB.
In the video, I give the team a hard time on a wide variety of topics: Texas itself, why U of T is late in coming to the SCC, and even the woeful shape of Texas football. The team members I talked to were confident, and even discussed the possibility of HPC clustering taking place in front of 50,000 screaming fans. Hmmm… not so sure that’s in the cards, but it’s a beautiful dream.
The time for dreaming will soon be over here at the SCC. The serious business of benchmarking will soon begin. Does Texas have what it takes to back up their reputation and semi-tough talk? We’ll soon see…
Posted In: Latest News, SC 2010 New Orleans
Tagged: Student Cluster Competition, University of Texas, TACC, SC 2010, Meet the teams