We catch up with the University of Colorado team (profile here) on the last day of the 2012 ISC Student Cluster Competition (or Kluster Kamph… or Hell on the Elbe) in Hamburg. Even though they were the last team to get started on the challenge (owing to their lackadaisical approach to the opening t-shirt scramble), they feel good about the competition and their chances.

Why shouldn’t they? They’re the most experienced team in the competition, and they breezed through HPCC, LINPACK, and various HPC applications that made up the challenge this year. Also, they weren’t thrown by either of the two surprise applications (WRF weather forecasting and Gromacs molecular modeling). In this short video, we talk to the team and get their final thoughts on the competition, the trip, and their chances.

Here at ISC 2012 in Hamburg, I sat in on this podcast with Rich Brueckner of insideHPC and Dr. Jack Dongarra, co-founder of the Top500 list. We talked about the 20-year evolution of the list and, of course, Sequoia, the BlueGene/Q system that topped the June 2012 rankings.

Dr. Dongarra spoke about Sequoia’s very impressive number of cores – 1.5 million, give or take a few – and its energy efficiency. The challenge, he said, will be to use it effectively to solve real-world problems. Give us a listen here.

The other U.S.-based team in the 2012 ISC Student Cluster Challenge is the University of Colorado, which hails from Boulder. Colorado is by far the most experienced team in Hamburg, having sent teams to all six SC Cluster Competitions. I recognized several of their current team members (along with the coach) from previous SC events.

The Buffaloes (profile here) have scored a few wins along the way, taking both a LINPACK and a Fan Favorite award in the past. But they’re also a team that seems snake-bit in some ways. They’ve faced a variety of problems over the years, ranging from power outages to hardware failures. But they’ve always pushed hard in the face of adversity and have never thrown in the towel. (I’m not sure there’s a towel to throw in… I think you’d throw in a power cord if you wanted to give up at a Student Cluster Competition.)

Is this the year that Colorado breaks through? According to the students, this has been their best start ever, and they aren’t seeing any problems on the horizon. We’ll see what happens as the scores are tabulated, but maybe – just maybe – this is the year the Buffs cross the finish line first. To get a better look at Team Colorado, check out this short video feature.

Chinese universities have gone student cluster crazy over the past year. When China was allotted two team slots at the ISC 2012 Student Cluster Competition, more than 300 schools expressed interest in participating. Thirty submitted proposals, forcing the country to conduct a play-in round to select two teams to make the Hamburg trip.

The overall winner was Beijing’s Tsinghua University (profiled here).  They’re a bit of an enigma, since they’re a first-time participant on the world Student Cluster Competition stage. But they beat out NUDT in the intra-China competition, and that means that they know their way around a cluster. You can meet the team in this short video.

The Stony Brook Seawolves are one of two U.S. teams competing in the ISC 2012 Student Cluster Competition in Hamburg this week. This isn’t the first time the school has participated in a contest like this, but it’s probably their longest road trip in terms of distance and culture (although NYC to Portland, Oregon is a close second).

Stony Brook (profile here) is bringing the fastest processors and the most cores to the competition, but they’re running a different software stack than the others. During the filming of our introductory video, the team was wrestling with some problems that threatened to force them  – I think – to essentially rebuild their cluster software stack. We’ll see if they can get it together in time to put up a good fight for the LINPACK crown or, failing that, come back strong on the application portion of the contest.

The short video below gives you a feel for the team and how they’re dealing with their early adversity.