Five Teams Show Immense Capability in the Student Cluster Competition

ISC inaugural Student Cluster Competition, sponsored by HPC Advisory Council and Airbus ended Wednesday, June 20 in Hamburg, Germany with all the five teams sharing a lot of sameness but also demonstrating a few key differences.  

The teams competed since Monday, June 18, to build and configure cluster computers, then run a series of applications to see which team could get the best performance. Here are the highlights:

• The “Overall Winner” award for the most aggregate points for all the benchmarks included in the competition went Tsinghua University. The team was also recognized for understanding the impact of weak and strong scaling on application performance.
• The team from China’s National University of Defense of Technology built the highest core count system in a hybrid architecture. The team also received an award for achieving the highest LINPACK score of 2.65 Teraflops.
• The team from Stony Brook University in New York was recognized for impressive troubleshooting and overcoming hardware and software challenges.
• The University of Colorado team was the first to run all the applications—including the secret ones.
• ISC’12 attendees voted the team from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) as the “Fan Favorite.” The KIT team also achieved the highest performance running the LINPACK benchmark on an x86-based cluster.

We look forward to hosting another exciting SCC in 2013. For further information please contact: scc@isc-events.com.