China’s Team Diablo Wins SC15 Student Cluster Competition

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Students eagerly await the results

Students eagerly await the results


 
SC15 has announced the winners of the Student Cluster Competition, which took place last week in Austin. The competition is a real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge in which teams of six undergraduates assemble a small cluster at SC15 and race to complete a real-world workload across a series of scientific applications, demonstrate knowledge of system architecture and application performance, and impress HPC industry judges.

Team Diablo, a team of undergraduate students from Tsinghua University in China, was named the overall winner. For the Tsinghua University team, this was their third win, coming on the heels of victories at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany and the Asia Supercomputing Community Student Supercomputer Challenge.

“After they announced it, we were really excited,” said Youwei Zhou, a senior undergraduate student and team spokesman. “Our secret is teamwork and each member is capable of understanding the hardware and software. When we get stuck on a problem and cannot progress, we always figure it out with more people working on it. We also find potential performance increases this way.”

The award for Student Cluster Competition Overall Winner is based on the combined score for correctly completed workload, benchmark performance, demonstrated understanding of architecture and performance through profiling and analysis, and interviews.

While not the overall winners, Team TUMuch Phun from the Technical University of Munich won the award for achieving highest performance for the Linpack benchmark.

In addition to the teams from China and Germany, the SC15 Student Cluster Competition line-up included:

  • Team Desert Heat, Arizona Research Computing, United States
  • Illinois Institute of Technology, United States
  • National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
  • Northeastern University, United States
  • Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, Australia
  • Universidad EAFIT, Colombia
  • University of Oklahoma, United States

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