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back to article Students smash competitive clustering LINPACK world record

Enormous happenings at the ISC17 Student Cluster Competition, where students from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat (FAU) broke the student cluster competition world record for HPL (LINPACK). This gives the home court German team the coveted Highest LINPACK award. This marks the first time a German team has won a major …

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  1. Lee D Silver badge

    Are you really just students who "guess" that the bus is overloaded?

    And am I reading this right, in that it's just a competition to slap a machine together without such knowledge and put as much stuff in as you can until you find the sweet spot?

    I find nothing technically interesting in either.

    3 1 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      it's just a competition to slap a machine together without such knowledge and put as much stuff in as you can until you find the sweet spot?

      You are Dilbert's Mom and I claim my five pounds.

      http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-02-26

      6 0 Reply
    2. Dan Olds
      Reply Icon
      WTF?

      Missing the point

      You couldn't be more wrong. If you have the time, read the other articles about these competitions. These kids spend months learning how to design a system and optimize the applications for it - while staying under the 3,000 watt power cap.

      It's not trial and error, more like testing permutations of hardware, software optimization, and then discovering the best combination. This is highly technical work, particularly for undergraduate students.

      Take another look at what they're doing before passing judgement.

      6 0 Reply
      1. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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        Re: Missing the point

        Besides, what you learn in theory during lectures is not always what happens in reality. Modern HPC architectures are complex beast, far more complex than the Cray J932 on which I did my first serious HPC work: that was a shared memory set-up with no processor caches, and 32 identical vector processing CPUs. Predicting what is would do on different workloads was hard enough, but it is much harder with the current mix of multi-core CPU, GPU, and all manner of buses and caches working at different speeds that make up a modern cluster.

        And anyway, this kind of competition is just fun!

        0 0 Reply
  2. Duncan Macdonald

    AMD EPYC

    How many P100s could you stick onto an AMD EPYC processor ? (And how big would the case and PSU need to be to handle them all !!! )

    2 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Hella effort bae students! Go get lit! Nom nom nom! <3

    As I believe Microsoft would put it.

    0 0 Reply
  4. Solarflare

    Dear Mr. Dan Olds

    Please do not put 'lol' in future articles, it looks ridiculous.

    1 7 Reply
    1. Hans 1
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      Thumb Up

      Re: Dear Mr. Dan Olds

      lol for the lulz!

      7 2 Reply
    2. Dan Olds
      Reply Icon

      Re: Dear Mr. Dan Olds

      Yeah, you make a good point. I just wanted to point out that I was trying to be funny with that comment - not serious. But if I have to point it out by inserting a "lol", then it's not funny enough to stand on it's own.

      3 0 Reply
  5. Korev Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Sacasm...

    This marks the first time a German team has won a major performance award on their home soil and is likely to result in the declaration of a national holiday featuring parades and a statue raising in their home town of Nuremburg.

    Why the sarcasm? This is quite an achievement for some students; >99% of the readership of this Esteemed Organ wouldn't be capable of doing this.

    11 1 Reply
    1. Hans 1
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      Re: Sacasm...

      It is always easy to smash, in theory, anybody can do better, the thing is, go do better, Mr. article author, love to see you perform better.

      Why no Windows ? Cost is not a concern, if I understand this correctly ... why no Windows ? oh, shit, I should know this, Windows cannot scale above a core ... or was it a thread ?

      1 1 Reply
    2. Dan Olds
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      Unhappy

      Re: Sacasm...

      NO sarcasm meant at all!!! I was trying to give it a 'sports caster' like spin. Sorry if I missed the mark. I'm very happy for the German team and their accomplishments. And I'll be cheering them on when they compete in the US later this year.

      3 0 Reply
    3. werdsmith Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Sacasm...

      "Why the sarcasm? This is quite an achievement for some students; >99% of the readership of this Esteemed Organ wouldn't be interested in doing this.

      FTFY

      0 0 Reply
  6. Lars Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Re: Sarcasm, I agree, came to think about it, they have, for good reasons, a statue of Zuse, the inventor of the modern computer.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse

    PS. Anything about the reaction to the first time a British team has won a major performance award on their home soil.

    1 0 Reply

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