From duct tape to tin-can communications systems, each of the 16 teams from around the world participating in this year’s Student Cluster Competition (SCC) has a secret weapon for winning the non-stop, 48-hour contest taking place in the Colorado Convention Center.
Just kidding—did you really think we were going to give away their hard-won formulas for success?
The teams, each made up of six students, are traveling to Denver from the across the U.S., Asia, and Europe to build working clusters on the exhibit floor and tackle real-world workloads. What all the teams seem to have in common is a sense of fun and excitement about meeting new people from around the globe, learning about new hardware and technologies, and squeezing in some job networking.
Alright, one secret: food. Candy and barbeque, in particular, played a big role in sustaining the students and helping maintain their quirky sense of humor as they persevered over the past year to meet with sponsoring mentors and vendors, and come up with leading-edge strategies.
Here’s something unique about each team that we can reveal.
Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen/Technical University of Munich, Germany
◾Team Name: TUMany†segFAUlts
◾Phun Fact: They pride themselves on writing words oddly and writing songs about segfaults
Georgia Institute of Technology
◾Team Name: Team Swarm
◾Fun Fact: Team members come from four states, six countries, and three continents
Illinois Institute of Technology/Maine South High School/Adlai E. Stevenson High School
◾Team Name: Chicago Fusion
◾Fun Fact: One anagram of all team member last names is: “Her grandest encircled prize algorithm gives vital slumber”
Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center
◾Team Name: MGHPCC Green Team
◾Fun Fact: No two team members are from the same country
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
◾Team Name: Supernova
◾Fun Fact: Winners of this year’s longest-travel time award—21 hours, counting a four-hour layover in Tokyo
National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
◾Team Name: ./confizure (./configure on Azure)
◾Fun Fact: They’re hoping for a power shutdown so they can keep calm and carry on while everyone else is freaking out
◾Northeastern University
◾Team Name: Huskies with Accelerated Computing Kernels (HACKS)
◾Fun Fact: They won the MacGyver award at last year’s SCC for building a backup cluster on sight when their hardware shipment was delayed
Peking University, ChinaTeam Name: Team Peking
◾Fun Fact: Their idea of a good time is exchanging discoveries about great open source projects
San Diego State University/Southwestern Oklahoma State University
◾Team Name: Thread Weavers
◾Fun Fact: They named their machine “kwolek” to honor Stephanie Kwolek, inventor of Kevlar™
Tsinghua,University,China
◾Team Name: THU-PACMAN
◾Fun Fact: Naturally, their theme song is the Pac-Man theme song used in the classic 2D game released in 1980
University of Science and Technology of China
◾Team Name: SwanGeese
◾Fun Fact: Winners of the SC16 Student Cluster Competition
University of Texas at Austin/Texas State University
◾Team Name: The Texas Longcats
◾Fun Fact: Their theme song is “Born to be Wild,” debuted by Steppenwolf in 1968
University of Utah
◾Team Name: The SupercompUtes
◾Fun Fact: Team members balance their coding time with breaks to hike, climb, bike, and ski
University of Warsaw/Lodz University of Technology/Warsaw University of Technology, Poland
◾Team Name: Warsaw Team
◾Fun Fact: They equate themselves to the Ship of Theseus—look it up!
William Henry Harrison High School
◾Team Name: The Sudo Wrestlers
◾Fun Fact: The first all-high school team to win a seat in the SCC—all are programmers in their school’s FIRST robotics team
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
◾Team Name: University of Illinois Student Cluster Team
◾Fun Fact: They ditched last year’s “Dinner with Interesting People” event to dine with less-interesting people
-article written by Jill A. Dunbar, NASA
