Student Cluster Competition
2018 Competition
Dallas, Texas
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
United States
- What is the name of your team and why did you choose it?
We are the University of Illinois Student Cluster Team. We decided to plainly adopt our university's name because we want to represent our home institution and pay tribute to the large amount of expert support and advice that we are being given.
- Why do you think your team will have an edge in the event (what's your secret sauce)?
We have very strong vendor support and expert advisors from the U of I and the NCSA. In addition, all of our team members have been selectively chosen from a large pool of talented students for their enthusiasm and experience in high performance computing.
- What have you done to prepare that makes your team unique?
Our team has been working with our primary industry sponsors Cray Supercomputing to design, build, and maintain a system that represents top of the line components so that we may be competitive in this competition. Our team members have been working over the previous year learning about HPC architecture, software optimization, and system administration. Additionally, we hold our own mock competition to test run our environment and iron out any issues that we encounter with our system.
- What are you most looking forward to in the competition?
Our team is primarily looking forward to the opportunity to learn from the industry and academic experts in high performance computing and to widen our own skill sets. Second, we hope to have a lot of fun in a spirited and friendly competition with other extremely talented students from across the world. We are all incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to participate in this competition!
- How long will it take you to get to Dallas?
About 2 hours by flight.
- What do your team members do for fun?
Our team members enjoy a wide range of activities. Of course, we all enjoy working with shiny new computers and GPUs that cost as much as a small house, but we also enjoy things like photography, long-boarding, playing musical instruments, driving motorcycles, health and fitness, biking, hiking, flying, and many more.
- If your team had a theme song, what would it be?
Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley.
- Can you share an interesting fact about your team?
In order to increase participation in HPC, our team has invited a group of understudy members that work alongside our competing members to build and optimize our system. This allows us the opportunity to teach a broader community of students outside of the 6 competing members, and also gives us the opportunity to train students for future team rosters.