Nice cluster, kid. But can these supercomputing students actually predict the weather?

Your correspondent wrote this blog during the action at the ISC’16 Student Cluster Competition arena, located on the trade show floor of the ISC’16 conference. So far, everything is going well for the teams – everyone has their hardware and finished their basic set-up over the weekend. Yesterday was when the rubber met the …

[Ian Bush]

And the software comes from ...?

"There’s a twist in the competition on this task: for the first time ever, students have to write their own algorithm to solve the graph problem. They aren’t allowed to use the reference implementation – they have to provide their own approach. Teams will be judged on the quality of their code as well as their solution to the problem. It’ll be interesting to see what happens on this application."

Good. Call me a grumpy old sod (you're a grumpy old sod Ian), but while good fun and a demonstration of problem solving ability I struggle to see the real relevance of these competitions; you simply don't cobble together your own clusters any more, or at least you shouldn't be doing. But often the software is a different matter - where's the recognition of the people who write the stuff that can actually exploit this hardware? While I've seen the names of the teams competing and we're promised videos introducing them there's not even a link to the applications web pages, let alone naming the teams or institutions that develop them.

I must get out more ...

[Dan Olds]

Re: And the software comes from ...?

Damn Ian, you ARE a grumpy old sod. There is plenty of relevance to these competitions, the main proof is because these kids get great jobs in the industry. Participating in these competitions gives the kids real world experience in project management, dealing with vendors, and working in teams - plus experience with optimizing an array of real world HPC applications.

I've done webcasts that you can find here on El Reg that cover some of the applications, application profiling, and other topics, so there is at least some coverage of the software side of things. But this competition is about the kids competing, not about the guys who write the programs they compete on.

There are plenty of software competitions, hackathons, and the like. This isn't one of them. I'm now going to officially suspend you from reading my coverage of these cluster competitions for two weeks, starting right after you read this response.

[asdf]

well

The forecasters did nail nearly a week in advance the heat wave hitting us right now but then again you are hardly going out on limb saying in late June its going to be hotter than fsck in Phoenix. The western desert lives and breathes (as its running for its car AC) In forty five degrees.

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

It's all fun and games until someone looses a rack...