Student Cluster Competition

• What is the name of your team and why did you choose it?
  
  When people hear the name of our team, RACKlette, we want them to feel 3 things: firstly, the smell of the swiss cheese and the joy we feel of representing Switzerland and ETH Zürich; secondly, the RACK gives a hint of what we are all about: run real-world fine-tuned workloads on our small (but beautiful) cluster; finally, in the combination of these words to build our team name, we want to give a sense of the team spirit and humor that has driven us in our journey so far!
  
  
• Why do you think your team will have an edge in the event (what is your secret sauce)?
  
  We have a combination of great hardware (especially the Intel Xeon Platinum 8180 Skylake-SP processors and the 16 NVIDIA V100s!) and have worked with a methodical tuning strategy for the different applications. We have also learnt from our past experience, and we know how important is to take advantage of every moment of the competition, and to not give up on any application runtime improvement until the last minute!
  
  
• What have you done to prepare that makes your team unique?
  
  Our preparation strategy is very straightforward: we meet twice a week to keep up-to-date with each other’s progress, plan our next steps, assign tasks and help each other when someone is stuck. This includes one morning hacking session, were we show each other what we have done, pass on knowledge, and continue working on our tasks. Usually each of us is assigned two benchmarks/applications to work on, interleaving in a manner such that there also are two people working on each.
  
  
• What are you most looking forward to in the competition?
  
  The conversations: walking around the different company booths to get a unique opportunity to talk to experts on supercomputing, as well as making friends with other HPC-enthusiastic students from all over the world.
  
  
• How long will it take you to get to Denver?
  
  We have two different flight paths: most of us will fly from Zürich to Denver, the others from Tokyo to Denver. With layovers this will take 14 to 16 hours respectivly.
  
  
• What do your team members do for fun?
  
  Manuel goes rowing (high performance rowing), Jinfen works on AI-related research projects, Thore runs ultra distance marathons, Emir engages in IT projects with our student union, Valeria plays the violin and loves to travel, and Jan tinkers with everything from small electronics to servers.
  
  
• If your team had a theme song, what would it be?
  
  Of course that has to be some traditional Swiss jodel song like "Ku-ku Jodel". :P
  
  
• Can you share an interesting fact about your team?
  
  We are extremely international! With 6 team members, we represent 5 countries from 2 continents: Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Turkey and China.