Student Cluster Competition
2017 Competition
Denver, Colorado
Georgia Institute of Technology
United States
- What is the name of your team and why did you choose it?
Team Swarm.
Each year, Georgia Tech's presence at the Supercomputing conference is felt: from papers in the main conference and workshops, to faculty participation in panels and keynotes, to students presenting at poster sessions and exhibition booths.
Up until this year, however, we have been absent from the cluster competition. Now, with our team competing, we believe Georgia Tech has officially swarmed SC'17 from all fronts. It also helps our mascot is a yellow jacket.
- Why do you think your team will have an edge in the event (what's your secret sauce)?
We believe we have assembled an excellent team of passionate and capable students and mentors. Through research projects, internships and coursework, we each possess prior interest and knowledge of High Performance Computing. Our experiences range from designing parallel streaming graph algorithms, to accelerating genomic applications using GPUs, to integrated circuit fabrication, to data analytics and parallel programming instrumentation.
- What have you done to prepare that makes your team unique?
Jerome: our reproducibility stack.
Jerome is the stack of tools we use for automating our system environment. These tools include Chef, Environment Modules, our RPM Package & Artifact Store and Fabric.
We have invested significant amount of energy automating our system environment. Consequently, during the competition, we will able to focus our energy on squeezing as much performance as possible, rather than dealing with annoying system configurations.
- What are you most looking forward to in the competition?
Aside from crushing Linpack and HPCG, we look forward to meeting other students and researchers interested in High Performance Computing. Additionally, for one of our members, who grew up in Boulder, this is a homecoming. For some other members, this will be their first time in Colorado.
- How long will it take you to get to Denver?
Roughly 4 to 5 hours
A direct flight from Atlanta to Denver is approximately 3 to 3.5 hours long. Accounting for potential delays, we estimate a 4-5 hours one-way travel time.
- What do your team members do for fun?
Within computing, many of our members compete at hackathons, Capture the Flags security competitions, and ACM style algorithm competitions.
Outside of our computing, our members can be found running marathons, playing sports like squash or baseball, designing fashionable clothing, leading youth ministries, and hiking.
- If your team had a theme song, what would it be?
Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley.
- Can you share an interesting fact about your team?
Geographically, our team members’ backgrounds span four states, six countries, and three continents.
