Wits wins 2015 Student Cluster Competition

Wits University has for a second-year running, snatched the top position in the annual CHPC Student Cluster Competition, making Wits the main component of the South African national team that will proceed to the international competition. The event took place at the CHPC National Conference held at the CSIR international Convention Centre, 30 November – 4 December 2015. Nine teams were given a budget and a parts-list for the cluster they were to build, they then chose a design and made important decisions on what the main features of their machines would be. They were then given some benchmarks and surprise applications to run on their machines and a panel of international judges made assessments of their hard work. 

Prizes

Best Perseverance Award: Supercomputing Smoothy & White HatsMost Creative Team: Team UKZNBest Cluster Design: Super C’sBest Team Work: Deep ThoughtBest Network Performance: Quad Core 2

Awards

3rd Place: Blink 101101102nd Place, highest Linpack and highest efficiency: Quad Core 11st Place: Wits 1The South African competition is made up of teams of four while the international level requires teams of six. So the judges selected two members from the Stellenbosch University’s team to make up the team to represent South Africa in Frankfurt, Germany in June 2016. In February 2016, the team of six will be visiting the Dell High Performance Computing Research and Development facility and the Texas Advances Computing Center in Austin, Texas. Watch here for the competition and the awards.