This year at SC12, University of Texas at Austin won the Student Cluster Competition, beating teams around the world, including the USA, Europe, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Russia and Taiwan.

None of us expected to win, but we didn’t expect to lose either…we were thrilled,” said Craig Yeh, a third year Computer Science major at The University of Texas at Austin. “The win validated all of the work we did since May leading up to the competition. I highly recommend this experience to other students at The University of Texas.”

The winning student team members include Andrew Wiley, Reid Douglas McKenzie, Michael Teng, Anant Rathi, Craig Yeh, and Julian Michael. The team and TACC partnered with Dell, Nvidia, and Intel to design and build a hybrid, power-saving system that integrated GPUs, Intel processors, and a new-generation Dell chassis. The company sponsors provide the hardware and travel funds, while the TACC mentors worked side by side with the students to teach them the fundamentals of cluster construction, systems administration, and program optimization. Chevron and Mellanox also served as sponsors of this year’s team.

It’s a real-world situation,” said John Lockman, the team’s lead mentor and a member of TACC’s High Performance Computing group. “For example, a data center in industry might need to expand, but can’t due to financial or space constraints, so they have a limited amount of power and a scientific workload that they have to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time.”

Read the Full Story.