In my continuing effort to provide the most comprehensive coverage of the upcoming SC11 Student Cluster Competition, I spent a few minutes on the phone with Jason Kilmer, a member of the 2010 University of Texas team. The Longhorns were…

The 2011 Student Cluster Challenge (SCC), the premier event in computer sports, is heading toward Seattle like an out-of-control, rocket-powered freight train overloaded with fireworks and cheap liquor. Eight teams of university students are getting ready to travel to SC11 to prove that their clusters can wring more processing out of 26 amps than their rivals’.

The tension is mounting as the teams ship their systems to Seattle in preparation for the November 12^th kickoff. The pressure is also mounting on handicappers who are trying to get a feel for the field this year prior to setting up betting lines.

There are lots of intriguing matchups, and plenty of angles for bettors to figure before laying their money down. The odds listed below are the opening odds – they’ll change over time as we get closer to kickoff. At the competition, the Overall Winner and the team posting the highest LINPACK score are recognized. The Overall Winner is the prize that everyone is chasing.

What will change them? You will. You can put some virtual money where your mouth is by ‘betting’ on which team is going to have the highest LINPACK number and which team will take the overall prize. Click on this link to let us know how you think it’ll turn out. The odds below are the early results from a handful of insiders and degenerate gamblers, so they’ll definitely change over time.

But first, whether you’re a wise guy or just a punter, you need to know what you’re doing if you’re going to bet the SCC. With that in mind, I’m providing a quick breakdown on the 2011 SCC field, starting with the teams that are returning from last year… (Read more below…)

In this webcast posted here on The Register, Jim and Doug touch upon the make-up of the technical program and what’s new this year. One of the most interesting new additions is the “State of the Practice” venue, which gives…

Boston University is another first-time SC11 Student Cluster Challenge (SCC) competitor. The application submitted by the BU Terriers made me laugh out loud – it was very well written and genuinely funny. This team has personality, and it’ll be great to have them in Seattle.

They’re not so great on the follow through, however; not one member of the BU team answered my pre-profile questionnaire, so I’m left with only the application and general knowledge of Boston to guide my evaluation.

The BU team is sponsored by Silicon Mechanics, an HPC provider specializing in rackmount servers and storage. They sell both Intel- and AMD-based systems along with NVIDIA GPU-fueled nodes. Storage specialist NetApp is also sponsoring the Terrier team. When their application was submitted earlier this year, they weren’t sure exactly what they’d bring to Seattle, but seemed pretty sure it would be “wicked fast” and maybe even a ‘wicked pissa bomb’ of a system. (Read more below…)

This year’s SC11 Student Cluster Challenge (SCC) will see five returning teams and three teams that are new to the competition (that’s eight total for those keeping track). One of the returning teams is the pride of Russia, the team from Nizhny Novgorod State University (NNSU).

NNSU is one of Russia’s premier research universities; it’s set the pace for Russian academic HPC. They were the first university to have a dedicated computer science faculty and one of the first universities to have their own cluster.

In their first appearance last year, NNSU had a unique approach. They were the only team running Microsoft Server and Windows HPC software, and one of only a couple of teams using NVIDIA GPUs to augment their Intel CPUs. The original plan was to run IBM iDataPlex nodes, but I don’t recall whether that’s what they actually had at the show. (Read more below…)

This is the second year the University of Texas Longhorns will compete in the Student Cluster Challenge (SCC) at the annual Supercomputing Conference. They brought a lot of personality to the competition last year with a “TACC to the Future” theme combining one of their sponsors (University of Texas Advanced Computing Center) with the series of increasingly crappy “Back to the Future” movies.

This Texas team is plenty confident – maybe just this side of cocky. Almost everyone on the team thinks they’re a favorite to win all the marbles (there aren’t any real marbles) or, at the very least, that they’re one of the top teams. (Read more below…)

Last year, the team from Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) overcame quite a bit of adversity to take the 2010 Student Cluster Challenge (SCC) crown* as the overall winner. The team also won a blue ribbon** for being one of the first three teams to break through the Teraflop barrier during the SCC.

They achieved these feats despite a sponsor change, with Acer stepping in to provide equipment at the last minute. This gave the team less opportunity to get to know their hardware; and Acer, while very helpful, isn’t a power in HPC and thus doesn’t have the resources that other vendors can offer.

Combine that with the language barrier, a tight travel schedule, and jet lag, and you’d think that the NTHU team would be at a distinct disadvantage. (Read more below…)

Lending a tropical air to the SC11 Student Cluster Challenge (SCC) are the Rainforest Eagles from Costa Rica’s Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (ITCR-ITS). This is the first team from the Caribbean, and at latitude 10° north, the southernmost team to date. So if you wagered that Taiwan, at 25° north, would be the competitor closest to the Equator – you lose. ITCR is also the first team from an isthmus – but I’m not aware of any active betting on this issue.

The ITCR Rainforest Eagles are also the first SCC team sponsored by colossus Cisco in cooperation with Cisco Gold Partner ITS-InfoCom of Costa Rica. At the time they wrote their application to the SCC, they hadn’t settled on their exact configuration, but it’s probably safe to say that it’ll include some flavor of Cisco UCS blade. (Read more below…)

The Colorado Buffaloes are one of five teams returning to the fifth annual Student Cluster Challenge (SCC) in Seattle next month during SC11. Like Purdue, Colorado has participated in every challenge but has yet to take home the gold medal. (There aren’t any gold medals awarded. Pity.)

The Buffaloes have won some awards and plaudits along the way, however. In 2008, they received a special Spirit Award for overcoming adversity outside their control. One of the requirements of the competition is that the systems the students use must be commercially available. When Intel slipped the launch date of their newest processor, Colorado’s configuration was disqualified. (Read more below…)