Student Cluster Competition
2019 Competition
Denver, Colorado
"University of Illinois Student Cluster Team"
(University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
- What is the name of your team and why did you choose it?
We are the University of Illinois Student Cluster Team. We chose this name to represent our university and the advisors at the university supporting us.
- Why do you think your team will have an edge in the event (what's your secret sauce)?
Our team is collaborating with advisors from the NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. As a result, we have access to HPC testbeds at the NCSA Innovative Systems Laboratory. This allowed us to look into various architectures and parallelization strategies for the SCC19 applications before our hardware was ready in order to execute and familiarize ourselves with the applications well in advance of the competition.
- What have you done to prepare that makes your team unique?
In addition to collaborating with the NCSA and professors at our university, we have several understudy members whom we mentor so that they can gain experience and compete in the Student Cluster Competition in the following years. Our understudies also provide the team valuable support with building and optimizing our system and will themselves mentor understudies one day.
- What are you most looking forward to in the competition?
We look forward to speaking with HPC experts to gain invaluable advice and knowledge. In addition, we would like to take this opportunity to connect with professionals and other students. Finally, we hope to have a great time competing against other brilliant students and learning about their approaches.
- How long will it take you to get to Denver?
It will take us 3 hours by flight to reach Denver.
- What do your team members do for fun?
While our team members share an interest in computing and technology, we also partake in a variety of unique activities. These include, but are not limited to, playing instruments, listening to music, playing rugby and football, solving puzzles, longboarding, amateur astronomy, and learning about vintage chiptunes and video game sound systems.
- 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?
Due to the acres of corn surrounding our university, our team knows about kernels better than anyone else!
