In five years of Student Cluster Challenge (SCC) action at the annual Supercomputing Conference, Purdue has yet to hoist the championship trophy over their collective heads. (There isn’t a championship trophy, but there should be.) They’ve had an impact, winning the Green Award for most flops/watt in 2008 and 2009, but they haven’t taken either the LINPACK or the overall crown. (There should be a crown too.)

This year, Purdue returns a team anchored by veterans who have participated in, or at least observed, the competition. They will be one of the more experienced teams in Seattle this year; the majority of team members say that they know their way around HPC. This could be bluster, but if their application is any guide, these guys know their clusters. (Read more below…)

We’re closing in on SC11, the annual HPC love fest that kicks off this year in Seattle on November 12th. Trish Damkroger, maestro of the SC11 exhibits this year, gives us an overview of what we’ll see in Seattle. We talk about how the exhibits have changed over the years and some of the specific attractions at the show this year. Trish is the deputy associate director of computation for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – when she’s not in charge of the exhibits portion of SC11. (Read more below…)

The field is set. Eight student teams have been selected to compete in the ultimate computer sports event of our time – the Supercomputing 2011 (SC11) Student Cluster Challenge, aka the SCC… aka Cluster for Glory… aka Clusterbowl, Cluster Cup, and Cluster-geddon.

I know that the vast majority of you feverishly follow this competition, but here’s a brief rundown for the small minority who are somehow unaware of what we’re talking about. (Read more below…)

How much is getting stock trades done 6 milliseconds quicker worth? About $300 million, as it turns out. A new transatlantic fibre cable promises to reduce the languid 65-milliseconds it take to transmit a trade between London and New York time to a quicker 59ms. Traders are expected to line up to use the new service and pay extra for the privilege.

The secret to the speed-up is using hollow core fibre rather than solid cores. According to Max Planck (the institute, not the man), traveling through solid glass slows light down by about a third. Details on the new cable and how they’re going to optimize it are here.

What really caught my eye was the Andrew Bach (head of NYSE Eurotext networks) saying “The speed-of-light limitation is getting annoying”. Look, pal, the speed of light is just something you’re going to have to live with. It’s the law….or is it? (See below…)

This year the supercomputing community gathers in Seattle on November 14-17 for SC11, the conference to learn and talk about designing, building, and coding the biggest computers in the world. So what can you expect? Who better to ask than…

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