Eight student teams from universities in the United States, Germany, China and Australia have been selected to compete in the Standard Track of the Student Cluster Competition to be held at the SC13 conference in Denver, Colorado, in November.
This year’s teams include the first-ever team from Australia, which will be traveling nearly 9,000 miles from Perth for the competition.
The following institutions will field teams:
- Boston University (USA);
- IVEC, a joint venture between CSIRO, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia (Australia);
- National University of Defense Technology (China);
- The University of Colorado, Boulder (USA);
- The University of the Pacific (USA);
- The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (USA);
- The University of Texas, Austin (USA); and
- Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany).
The Student Cluster Competition showcases student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition held in conjunction with SC13, an international conference on high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis.
This real-time, 48-hour non-stop challenge will feature teams of undergraduate and/or high school students building, tuning and racing HPC clusters of their own design on the SC13 exhibition floor. The teams will race against each other and the clock to run the greatest number of applications. An added catch is that teams will be required to run workloads on the same power needed to run only three coffee makers. Now in its seventh year, the Student Cluster Competition serves to showcase young computing talent and foster HPC education development.
'We received 13 proposals for the Student Cluster Competition and planned to select six teams to compete, but the caliber of the proposals was so high we decided to go with eight teams,' said Student Cluster Competition chair Dustin Leverman of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
'Though the selection process was very difficult, it makes me confident that it will be a good competition this year. It’s always exciting to watch the students as they apply what they’ve learned in this hands-on race to the finish.'
