Student Cluster Competition
2017 Competition
Denver, Colorado
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
United States
- What is the name of your team and why did you choose it?
We are the University of Illinois Student Cluster Team. We decided to plainly adopt our university’s name because we want to represent our home institution and pay tribute to the large amount of expert support and advice that we are being given.
- Why do you think your team will have an edge in the event (what's your secret sauce)?
We have very strong vendor support and expert advisors from the UofI and the NCSA. In addition, all of our team members have been selectively chosen from a large pool of talented students for their enthusiasm and experience in high performance computing.
- What have you done to prepare that makes your team unique?
We are working with Jump Trading, an expert in using HPC resources for trading and market analysis. Jump Trading has been working with us since last year, and they are also offering to send us to their data center for a practice run and to meet their experienced HPC system engineers.
- What are you most looking forward to in the competition?
Our team is primarily looking forward to the opportunity to learn from the industry and academic experts in high-performance computing and to widen our own skill sets. Second, we hope to have a lot of fun in a spirited and friendly competition with other extremely talented students from across the world.
- How long will it take you to get to Denver?
About 5 hours including layover.
- What do your team members do for fun?
Our team members enjoy a wide range of activities. Of course, we all enjoy working with shiny new computers and GPUs that cost as much as a car, but we also enjoy things like photography, long-boarding, playing musical instruments, listening to music, driving motorcycles, health and fitness, biking, hiking, flying, and many more.
- 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?
Some of our team members attended the "Dinner with interesting people" event at SC16, but ultimately decided to leave and have dinner with some less interesting people.
