Revealed: This year's STUDENT RACK WARS winner

Unprecedented and surprising ISC’14 Kluster Kampf results analyzed

HPC blog While I had posted detailed results of the ISC’14 Summer Cluster Slam (here and here), I just realized that I had neglected to put out the final standings and analysis. This makes me an idiot. (Well, not only this, there are a lot of other things that contribute to that assessment as well.)

First the big surprise: Team South Africa took the Overall Championship Gold Medal for the second consecutive time. Last year, the plucky South Africans were a first-time competitor, which usually means a middle-of-the-pack finish.

In addition to being the first team from South Africa, they didn’t really know each other. The team was formed from three different schools that had sent students to compete at the first annual CHPC regional cluster competition.

That 2013 South African team came out of nowhere to narrowly defeat the rest of the field at ISC’13, which send shockwaves through the student cluster competition world (LINK).

But even with the 2013 trophy under their belt, very few expected them to repeat at the 2014 ISC competition. (Well, I did ... but that’s because I was fortunate enough to witness the 2013 edition of their regional competition. More on that later ...)

But Team South Africa once again topped the field and takes home the Overall Championship trophy. They not only scored the first repeat win in the ISC competition, they did it with an entirely new team of students.