Now that the US elections are over, it’s obvious that the world’s attention has shifted to the upcoming Student Cluster Competition (SCC), which will kick off next Monday at SC12 in Salt Lake City.

The traditional ‘Big Iron’ competition (details here) has teams of undergraduates benchmarking their home-grown clusters to see which school is best at wringing the most HPC app performance from only 26 amps (120 volts). This is the event that has become the largest spectacle in computer sports and a beloved part of every SC conference.

But now, there’s something new and different…

A couple of old-timer teams round out the field at the upcoming SC12 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) in Salt Lake City. These contests started in 2007 and between them, these two teams have participated in a total of nine matches.

Each school has six team members plus three advisors/coaches. Let’s assume that the competition consumes six hours per week (it’s probably more) for six months: conservatively, students and faculty at these two schools have invested more than 25,000 hours in designing, building, testing, and ultimately competing against other teams with their clusters. That’s 631 weeks of a 40-hour-per-week job, or more than 12 years of real-world working life. (This assumes a typical US or Asian fifty-week work year. Europeans should adjust to correct for longer vacations, holidays, ‘sick’ day allowances, work stoppages, etc.)

(And if you have no idea what I’m prattling on about, you can find details about the SC12 Student Cluster Competition here and the apps they’ll be running here.)

So who are these two stalwart cluster competitors? Let’s meet ‘em…

A couple of new – and quite different – teams are looking to shake things up at next week’s SC12 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) in Salt Lake City. For the first time, we’ll see a coalition of elite schools combine forces to take on their more experienced competitors. We will also see another SCC first: an all-female team. Here’s a quick look:

(Here’s a link for more details on competition rules and what they’ll be doing.)

2012 is the Year of the Dragon according to Chinese astrologers, and it’s been a most auspicious year for Chinese HPC student cluster teams. So far this year (yes, you damned nitpickers, I’m keeping in mind that Chinese New Year began on 2/4/2012), China has dominated the Student Cluster Competition circuit. Their Tsinghua and NUDT university teams took both the Overall and highest LINPACK awards at ISC’12 in Hamburg. With wins at the upcoming competition at SC12 in Salt Lake City, they have a solid chance to finish out the 2012 season undefeated. This hasn’t happened since… well, never. Up until 2012, the only student cluster competitions were held at the annual US-based SC conference. With the addition of a cluster competition at the European ISC shows, we now have a full-fledged circuit, right?

(For details on the competition and rules, click here and here.)

China is sending two teams to the Great Salt Lake Siege. Let’s take a closer look at them:

People in most US states would be ecstatic (or, perhaps, totally indifferent) to hear that one of their universities made it to the 2012 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) in Salt Lake City, but the state of Texas wanted more. So they’re sending two teams to the Great Salt Lake Siege. Details on competition rules, applications, and prizes are here and here. (Since there aren’t any prizes, I didn’t have to write a story about them, thus no link.) Go ahead and read those articles; I’ll pause here until you catch up…

With that out of the way, let’s take a closer look at the Texas combatants:

The apps for this year’s edition of the SC12 Student Cluster Competition are the typical mix of HPC workloads, chosen to represent a range of scientific disciplines and computational challenges. In order to drink deeply from the chalice of victory student teams will need to crawl inside each of the apps, find the bottlenecks, and figure out how to work around them – or make them less bottlenecky. (Note: there is no actual chalice of victory in the Student Cluster Competition. But there should be, don’t you think?)

Here are the scientific apps that the students will be wrestling with this year in Salt Lake City:

It’s November, which can mean only one thing for computer sports enthusiasts: it’s time for another Student Cluster Competition. The seventh edition of this annual event begins in about two weeks at the SC12 conference in beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah. The competition pits teams of university undergrads against each other in a marathon battle to prove that they can design, build, and run the fastest (and most efficient) cluster.

There are two different tracks in the competition this year. The first is the traditional  ‘build your own hardware’ big iron track in which students design, build, and optimize their own clusters. The second track is a new pilot competition: teams are issued the same hardware (a six-node, Atom-based LittleFE cluster in a box) and challenged to wring the most performance out of it. This article discusses the big iron track; I’ll take a look at the LittleFe competition in an upcoming story.

For the big iron competition, the rules are pretty simple. Each team is composed of six undergraduate students, typically from a single university. The teams design and build their own clusters, getting equipment from one or more sponsors. They can use any hardware or software that’s available on the market and that they can wheedle out of their sponsors. The only limit on their systems is that they can’t draw more than a total of 26 amps of juice.

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While at IBM’s Smarter Computing Summit last week at the tony Pinehurst golf resort, I had the great pleasure of hearing IBM’s Bernie Meyerson talk about limits to today’s tech, and the associated implications. Bernie is IBM’s VP of Innovation and one of the rare technologist/scientist types who can clearly and directly explain highly technical concepts in a way that they can be understood by a reasonably intelligent grey squirrel (and me too).

Even better, he’s highly entertaining and doesn’t hedge when it comes to stating what’s what in the world. Back in 2003 he predicted that Intel would never deliver on their fast CPU (4-5 Ghz) promises and would, in fact, be forced to shift to multi-core processors.

Meyerson backed up his brash prediction (it was plenty brash back then) by sharing electron microscope images of individual atoms that showed they’re kind of lumpy. The problem with lumpy atoms is that when you use only a handful of them to build gates, they leak current like a sieve. When asked about this, Intel denied, denied, denied, that there was a problem – right up to the point when they announced they were scrapping their entire product strategy in favor of a multi-core approach.

So when Meyerson talks, I pay attention. And Meyerson is talking again.