Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/16/scc_day_one_round_up/

Student Cluster Competition: And they're off!

One team nearly doesn't make it

By Dan Olds

Posted in HPC, 16th November 2010 14:22 GMT

SC10 Here I am in rainy New Orleans covering the Student Cluster Competition at SC10.

The students bring their own self-designed and built clusters to the show, re-assemble them, and race to complete a set of benchmarks and workloads in the quickest time.

The competition will test their system design skills, their aptitude for learning new programs and new methods, and their ability to optimize code to produce more (and better) output than their rivals - You can find out more in our introductory SCC article and webcast.

It's Day One and the eight teams, six from the USA, one from Russia and one from Taiwan, are setting up their rigs - except for Florida A&M, whose supplier failed to get their equipment in time for the competition start.

SC10 organisers and some other teams rallied round to help them get to the starting line.

Such drama for an HPC contest - the China vs USA battle going on for Top500 supercomputing bragging rights has nothing on this.

I have compiled eight blogs - complete with video, one for each team, and their day ones. They're not very long and are fairly interesting. If they aren't interesting, then at least they're short. Plus the videos have music!

They are, in no particular order: