What first struck me when I came upon the Purdue booth at the Student Cluster Competition was the quiet. At the other booths students were talking, tweaking systems, eating, and doing the typical stuff you’d associate with this kind of event.

Not the same picture at the Purdue booth. I’ve spent considerable time wandering around observing (and probably annoying) the various teams. All I’ve seen at the home of the Boilermakers is heads-down intensity. They don’t talk much. I haven’t heard a laugh yet, but thought that I might have seen a smile – it was so fleeting that I couldn’t be sure.

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The Russian team from the Nizhni Novgorod National Research University exuded a quiet confidence as they prepared for the competition on Sunday. Despite the challenges of traveling great distances, the language and cultural differences, and last-minute hardware tweaking, they are composed and ready for whatever the SCC will throw them.

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Polite, subdued, and with an air of confidence and competence, the NTHU (National Tsing Hua University) team from Taiwan quietly went about their business during the Student Cluster Competition prep time on Sunday.

They were all smiles to the people passing by, but all business in terms of HPC clustering. It’s an experienced institution that’s fielded two teams in the past. But this team is new to both SCC and HPC, which is why they’ve been training with veterans from past teams.

Texas is at SC10 with what looks to me to be the most elaborate booth of the SCC competition – at least in terms of artwork and theme. Their booth is festooned (or at least half-festooned) with “TACC to the Future” posters that play off the “Back to the Future” movies from the 1980s. TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center) is the lead technical (and probably spiritual) advisor to the Longhorn team.

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Eight university teams – six from the US, one from Russia, and one from Taiwan – descend on the SC10 supercomputing show in New Orleans next week to take part in the Student Cluster Competition (SCC). Each team arrives with…

So what’s it like to compete in the SC10 Student Cluster Competition (SCC)? We find out in this latest webcast on The Register.

You’re a college student, one of six on a team representing your university. Your team is charged with designing, building, and benchmarking a cluster that outperforms those built by seven rival teams in the competition. A few rules constrain your design, the hardware has to be readily available, you can only use 26 amps, and your cluster has to fit into a single rack.

You have a faculty advisor to help you along, and vendor sponsors who provide the gear. But when the competition starts, you are completely dependent upon your teammates and the knowledge you’ve picked up along the way.

In quiet moments, you can almost feel the tension building. It’s a combination of anticipation, hope, dreams and, yes, fears too. From around the world, eight teams of university students are preparing to travel to New Orleans to meet their destiny at SC10 in the Student Cluster Competition.

The SCC is the arena in which these teams will test themselves against their peers. The competition will test their system design skills, their aptitude for learning new programs and new methods, and their ability to optimize code to produce more (and better) output than their rivals. It’s a technical gut check that takes place on the biggest stage in the HPC industry – the annual SC show.

This webcast on The Register discusses the SCC, the tasks, what the teams go through, and how they will be judged. Hai Ah Nam, SC10 committee chair for this event, sets the stage for what’s to come in just three short weeks from now. (It might be more like 24 days from today… but it will really depend on when you watch this webcast.)

ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation for SMP software is now certified to run on IBM’s newest x86 boxes, according to TPM’s story here. Like Tim, I’ve been a bit surprised that ScaleMP is still running free and hasn’t been bought by one of the big guys. It’s good news for both parties that ScaleMP’s stuff is now officially blessed by IBM; reading about it caused an almost coherent stream of thought about cause/effect and futures.

[Begin almost-coherent thought stream] To me, this is another sign that points out the trend toward IT disaggregation.

Hewlett-Packard is looking to steal a step on everyone in the industry with their POD-Works factory approach to building new data centers or adding capacity to old ones. PODs are HP’s term for the now-ubiquitous shipping container-style mini data centers that started catching on (at least with vendors) a few years ago. HP is taking the concept a step further by applying large-scale industrialization to the process of producing PODs in volume. Our pal TPM provides further detail on PODs here.

HP’s POD-Works is co-located in Houston with one of their major manufacturing and distribution centers. This way they have quick access to loads of hardware, as this is a primary receiving center for HP x86 gear. They have a new facility they’ve purpose-built for building out, testing, and qualifying the pods before they’re shipped to the customer. I think this has the potential to change the economics of buying at scale. Why?

I’ve talked to several folks at the 2010 GPU Tech Conference about the burgeoning need to be able to dynamically share GPUs across multiple systems without having to re-cable boxes or bog down the system by moving processing from one box to another. Dell put forward a solution with their C410x PCIe extension box (story here) that allows eight systems to be connected to 16 PCIe devices – including GPUs.