We spent a few minutes talking to Team China before they submitted their final results for the 2011 Student Cluster Competition. They’re happy and had a good time, but it’s hard to figure out how they gauge their chances. We’ll…

We caught up with Team Boston (aka Team Chowder) a few hours before they turned in their results for SC11. They shared their thoughts about the competition and their results thus far, along with whatever else went through their sleep-deprived…

At SC11 I had a bit of a unique opportunity to talk to some of the people responsible for what must be the biggest computer upgrade known to man. Oak Ridge National Labs is upgrading its current Cray XT5 ‘Jaguar’ system to a Cray XT6 system that will be known as ‘Titan’.

It’s quite a facelift. Today, Jaguar is a 1.75 PFlop super with more than 18,000 nodes containing 224,162 cores of AMD 6-core Istanbul processors. In 2009, it was the first system to provide greater than a petaflop sustained performance, taking the number one slot on the Top500 list.

Two years later it’s not exactly a performance dog, but it’s been knocked down to number three on the list, supplanted by the Fujitsu 10.5 PFlop K Computer and China’s NUDT 2.56 PFlop Tianhe-1A.

The transition from Jaguar to Titan will be profound, with a performance boost to somewhere around 20 PFlops – which should put it somewhere near the top, it not the pinnacle, of the Top500. The biggest factor in the upgrade will be the move from a traditional CPU-based architecture to a hybrid CPU+GPU design. (Read more below…)

This short video captures the start of the application portion of the 2011 Student Cluster Competition. The students had spent all day Monday driving their systems to produce the best LINPACK and HPCC result possible. On Monday evening at 7:30…

Part of NVIDIA founder/CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s SC11 keynote session was a demo of something called Maximus that elicited oohs and ahhs from some of the folks around me.

An animator of something called Shrek (I think it’s a music video or TV show) built an animated scene in real time as we watched. It was a combination of complex physical action (water running down a mountain, then being stolen by an alien spacecraft) that also included highly detailed visuals.

Developing these kinds of effects used to be an all-night effort, with animators setting up the scene and letting workstations or server farms process the work overnight. The next morning they’d get their coffee, take a look at the output, and run it by the director for approval. (Read more below…)

The results from the LINPACK portion of the Student Cluster Competition in Seattle have been released. This brief (barely three minute) video reveals all, including a short discussion of the LINPACK rules, the winner, individual team results, and the last…

What can you say about the University of Texas Longhorns that they haven’t already said about themselves? They’ve got swagger for sure, and their LINPACK-topping success in 2010 showed that they can back up at least part of it. The…

The team from Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University is on a mission: to become the first university to repeat as Student Cluster Competition champions. While the team this year is almost entirely new, they have the same coach and have…

Team Russia, representing the State University of Nizhny Novgorod, is returning to the Student Cluster Competition for the second time. The team is again going with a hybrid approach, mixing Xeon CPUs (84 cores) and as many as 12 NVIDIA…

Purdue is another team that’s participated in the SC Student Cluster Competition (SCC) since its inception. They’re a solid team with a half-n-half mixture of rookies and SCC veterans. This year they’re bringing the typical workmanlike Purdue attitude to the…