I thought I would point you to some exciting work students are participating in over at Texas Advanced Computing Center.  TACC is mentoring several University of Texas at Austin students in the SC10 Student Cluster Competition to be held this November in New Orleans.  This is great work that the students are doing, and it is great to see involvement from TACC and support from the HPC community.  Here are some brief details of the SC10 challenge to build a system within the power constraints equivalent to only three coffee-makers!

The Student Cluster Competition (SCC) showcases the computational impact of clusters and open source software in the hands of motivated and sleep-deprived students under both a time and power constraint. Uh, no pressure…

During SC10, teams consisting of six students… will compete in real-time on the exhibit floor to run a workload of real-world applications on clusters of their own design while never exceeding the dictated power limit.

Prior to the competition, teams work with their advisor and vendor partners to design and build a cutting-edge commercially available small cluster constrained by the 26 amps available during the conference. Teams must also learn the four open source competition applications and are encouraged to enlist the help of domain specialists.”

It is exciting to see students motivated to work on some of the challenges we face in the industry.  I first met the two student leaders of this six-person group at SC09 in Portland last year. Read the rest of this entry »