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GPU’s Give Students Edge in Global SC11 Cluster Competition

Andrew_Walsh-0042-blog By
On Nov 18 2011 in Supercomputing
4 Comments 4 Comments

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The Supercomputing (SC) conference hosts the annual Student Cluster Competition to challenge university students to build the most powerful computing clusters within a 26-amp power limit. At SC11, which took place in Seattle, Wash. this week, four of the top five teams used NVIDIA GPUs to attain Student Cluster Competition glory.

The top teams received major recognition in the supercomputing industry, and all participating teams gained valuable experience in building computing clusters. The students’ clusters were benchmarked and scored using scientific applications selected by contest organizers.

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The National Tsing Hua University team’s cluster.

The top five SC11 Student Cluster Competition teams were:

  1. Taiwan – National Tsing Hua University
  2. China – National University of Defense Technology
  3. USA – University of Texas
  4. USA – Boston University
  5. Russia – Nizhni Novgorod State University

By the way, don’t feel bad for the Russian team. Nizhni Novgorod State University took home the prize for the highest overall performance, as measured on LINPACK. The Russian team managed to squeeze almost 2 teraflops of performance out of their small, low-power cluster.

These accomplishments are remarkable, and we congratulate Team Taiwan on their victory. Kudos to all the student teams in this competition. Student competitions like this can only help accelerate the course of computational science.

If you’d like to learn more about the competition, I encourage you to check out the SC11 Student Cluster Competition web site.

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  • Sumit Gupta

    See article on the SC Student Cluster by Dan Olds in The Register
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/19/taiwan_2011_student_cluster_competition_winners/

  • http://twitter.com/Whamcloud Whamcloud, Inc.

    Congratulations to all the teams and individuals for an excellent showing.  I am very impressed with the students I met and think this is a wonderful event to bring new interest and enthusiasm to our community.  As  a vendor for HPC, we are proud to be sponsors of the event and play a small part in helping it happen.

    I also interviewed a number of students and hope we can make some opportunities happen for them.  If you are in the market and able to support students, I urge you to participate!

    Brent

  • Will Park

    Thanks for the link, Sumit. Great read. Appreciated the detailed specs on the Top 5 systems in the SC11 Student Cluster Competition. 

  • http://twitter.com/BelBES Sergey

    In the article Dan admitted inaccuracy, the team NNSU (Russia) brought a cluster of 12 cards NVIDIA Tesla, really, we only used 6 cards because more cards are not removed in 110-volt 26A.

    Best regards,
    Sergei Belousov