So what’s it like to compete in the SC10 Student Cluster Competition (SCC)? We find out in this latest webcast on The Register.
You’re a college student, one of six on a team representing your university. Your team is charged with designing, building, and benchmarking a cluster that outperforms those built by seven rival teams in the competition. A few rules constrain your design, the hardware has to be readily available, you can only use 26 amps, and your cluster has to fit into a single rack.
You have a faculty advisor to help you along, and vendor sponsors who provide the gear. But when the competition starts, you are completely dependent upon your teammates and the knowledge you’ve picked up along the way.
In our last webcast, we talked to Hai An Nam, the SC10 SCC committee co-chair, who delivered an overview of the competition. In this new webcast we get the inside view from Dustin Leverman, who captained the University of Colorado (Boulder) team at the first SCC in 2007. Dustin tells us the story of his team and their highs and lows, and also talks about what it takes to successfully compete in the SCC.
In Dustin’s case at least, it’s not an overstatement to say that it changed his life. He received an internship offer at SC07 that changed his career trajectory.
Dustin is now an HPC Systems Administrator for the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Nice.
Posted In: Latest News, SC 2010 New Orleans
Tagged: Student Cluster Competition, SC 2010