Revealed: This year's STUDENT RACK WARS winner

Unprecedented and surprising ISC’14 Kluster Kampf results analyzed

Honorable mentions & fan favorites

Team Chemnitz gets an honorable mention for finishing fourth out of the field of 11, plus for showing a massive improvement over their 2013 scores. They also grabbed the Fan Favorite award this year.

There was a constant stream of visitors circulating around their corner booth, which, coupled with their willingness to engage with the crowd and good humor, gave them a lot of late-breaking votes in the Fan Favorite competition.

Team Hamburg and Team Edinburgh were also show favorites. Both teams were very outgoing and approachable, which goes a long way with show goers.

So what have we learned?

The ISC’14 competition has taught us a lot, in fact. Here’s a nicely organized list of quick takeaways:

Dynasty isn’t just an old TV show: South Africa’s CHPC might be on their way to building a Student Cluster Competition dynasty that could rival both American (University of Texas, Austin) and Chinese (Tsinghua, NUDT, Ming) dynasties. From what I’ve observed, the South Africans may have broken to code when it comes to taking inexperienced students and turning them into HPC dynamos. I’m going to do some in-depth reporting on the “South African Way” in upcoming articles.

Experience isn’t king when it comes to student clustering: This was the first competition for second place finisher, Team USTC. In fact, two of the three winning teams in past ISC cluster competitions were first time competitors. And our most recent winner, Team South Africa, was composed of students who were entirely new to the team and the high pressure world of big time student clustering.

It’s the meat-ware, not the hardware: A close look at results from past cluster competitions reveals that the teams with the latest and greatest hardware, or the most hardware, typically aren’t the big winners. Time and time again, we see that the winning edge comes from how the students tune their systems to more efficiently run the applications.

Even more important is how the team responds to the inevitable glitches, breakdowns, and mis-configurations that always occur. If the team doesn’t panic, if they pull together and think their way through the problem, they’ll typically be fine. Just like in the movies.

Next up is our exhaustive coverage of the SC14 student cluster competition. Stay tuned ...