Revealed: This year's STUDENT RACK WARS winner

Unprecedented and surprising ISC’14 Kluster Kampf results analyzed

Photo finish for second place

The second and third place finishers were also a big surprise to me and most other competition observers.

Team USTC (University of Science and Technology of China) was a first time competitor and, as such, wasn’t expected to make many waves at ISC’14. But make waves they did.

Sponsored by Chinese server vendor Sugon, Team USTC parlayed a 100 per cent score on HPCC, and a field-leading 90 per cent score on the interview, into a solid second place finish. A better score on the "secret mission" task and we’d be crowning them the winner of the Overall Championship. This is definitely a team to watch in future cluster competitions.

The third-place finisher, China’s Team Tsinghua, is a very familiar team to student cluster competition fans. Together with long-term sponsor Inspur, Tsinghua has participated in five previous competitions, taking home two overall championships, plus a LINPACK prize. Their experience and skills make them a team to be reckoned with in any cluster competition, and usually a favourite – except at ISC’14 this year.

Why? Their hardware configuration. Team Tsinghua went with an old-school traditional cluster. No Phi co-processors, no NVIDIA Teslas, no accelerators at all. And their configuration, which included 10 nodes, 240 CPU cores, and 1.28TB of memory, wasn’t even the largest cluster in the field.

Most observers, myself included, figured this would put them out of the running at ISC’14. They simply wouldn’t have enough horsepower to run with the big dogs. But run with the big dogs they did. (Second Yoda-like sentence in this story, if anyone is keeping track.)

In our conversations, it was clear that Team Tsinghua knew what they were up against. They knew they couldn’t hang with the other teams, who were running accelerated gear, when it came to HPCC and HPL.

This left them with only one option: they had to ace the scientific application portions of the competition. It was their only chance to add another cluster crown to their trophy case back home.

They almost pulled it off. A 99 per cent score on GADGET-3, a second place finish on the secret mission task, plus a strong score on Quantum ESPRESSO, put them in the running. They were also one of only two teams to turn in a valid result for every application and task (South Africa was the other).

Unfortunately, Team Tsinghua came up a little short. Their dreams of an amazing come-from-behind victory were dashed. But they did snare a third place finish, which was an outstanding result when you consider what they were going up against.