What's missing from this coverage is...
...what software are the winning teams running to get their compute jobs done.
This doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere. The only thing I could find was at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/14/guide_to_student_cluster_compos/?page=2
which says:
"The vast majority of teams run some flavour of Linux, although there were Russian teams in 2010 and 2011 who competed with a Microsoft software stack"
But presumably they are using some sort of HPC framework - HTCondor? Torque? Maui? Slurm? Something Hadoop-ish like YARN, Oozie, Cascading, Azkaban? Are they running tightly-coupled jobs with OpenMPI? Or did they roll their own framework?
There would be real value in knowing which approach worked best for the winning teams across the wide variety of tasks thrown at them.