I’m going to refrain from punning on the word “wurst.” You’re welcome.
That said, let’s take a closer look at the teams…
Team Chemnitz is making their second appearance at ISC’14. You might remember them from last year, where they premiered their astounding ‘Coffee Table of Doom’ cluster, which was fueled by sixteen (yes, sixteen) power-hungry accelerators.
They took a more measured approach this year, with six nodes (120 cores), 768GB memory, and eight NVIDIA K40c accelerators. What’s unchanged from last year is their system form factor: tower workstations with a coffee table roof.
This is a fun team, as you’ll see from the video. They all have a good sense of humor and solid HPC smarts to match.
(Click image to play.)
Special note: As backing music in the video, I’m playing songs performed by a member of the Chemnitz cluster team. His group, Nachtwindneim, recently recorded a CD, which he gave to me at the show. Good stuff indeed, and I’m happy to include it in the video.
Team Hamburg: This is the first time we’ve seen a team from the University of Hamburg. In the video they’re comfortable and personable, and they deny that there’s any pressure on them to defend their home soil.
Hamburg is rolling old-school at ISC’14 – just CPUs, no GPUs or other accelerators. However, their system is a bit blingy in other ways. They have LEDs that shine in different colors depending on how hard their system is working.
(Click image to play.)
Their cluster case is interesting too. To me, it looks exactly like what a traveling polka band would use to house their best accordions. But for Hamburg, the case was loaded with nine Xeon E5-2660 fueled compute nodes, each with 128GB of memory, and an Infiniband interconnect.
Enjoy the interview with the Hamburg team and the cheerful polka music as well.
Posted In: Latest News, ISC 2014 Leipzig
Tagged: supercomputing, Student Cluster Competition, HPC, Chemnitz University of Technology, ISC 2014, University of Hamburg, Meet the teams