Team Diablo Wins Student Cluster Competition

Team Diablo, comprised of undergraduate students from Tsinghua University in China received the top prize in the Student Cluster Competition at this year’s Supercomputing Conference in Austin, Texas. This is the team’s third win after victories at the International Supercomputing Conference and Asia Supercomputing Community challenges.

The student competition included the following teams:

• 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

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.

The students partner with vendors to design and build a cutting-edge cluster from commercially available components, not to exceed a 3120-watt power limit and work with application experts to tune and run the competition codes.

“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.”

Below you’ll find a video about the Student Cluster Competition.

For more information, visit SC15.

Sources: Press materials received from the organization and additional information gleaned from the organization’s website.