Cluster-grappling kids clash: Battle of the Big Iron in the Big Easy

Bring your HPC weapons to the Mississippi

Cruiserweights Represent

The rest of the field may have somewhat smaller systems in terms of node count, but they’re still packing more than enough compute to top the 3,000 watt power cap and perhaps nab the LINPACK or Overall Championship crowns. Let’s take a closer look ...

Illinois Institute of Technology is a first-time competitor at SC14. Located in Chicago, IIT was the result of a 1940 merger of the Armour Institute of Technology (founded in 1890) and Lewis Institute.

Both of these schools had nationally ranked engineering programs. I would assume that the Armour Institute mainly focused on engineering better beef and pork products – designing new classes of canned hams that can, for example, handle particularly harsh environments or high impact events.

Team IIT has packed quite a cluster sack lunch for its first outing at SC14. It was originally going to use an eight-node heavyweight system, but one of its nodes literally melted down during testing (with smoke and all), taking it out of play.

After some rejiggering, the team went forward with a six-node box loaded with twelve 18-core Intel E5-2699v3 processors running at 2.3GHz. It was buttressing these 216 CPU cores with six NVIDIA Tesla GPUs – sort of like an extra helping of flavourful pimentos in their salami.

Team IIT is also making a bit of history. It is the first team to include a female high school student as a member. You’ll meet her and the rest of the team in its upcoming introductory video, so stay tuned for that.

Team Sooner (University of Oklahoma) had to show up sooner or later in a SC cluster competition (bad pun, but true). Anyone who follows US college sports knows that the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma are bitter rivals. Their annual football game, dubbed the Red River Rivalry, is played in Dallas – which is exactly halfway between the two campuses.

Fans split up in the stadium, with burn orange Longhorn supporters on one side, and red clad Sooner fans on the other, separated by electrified razor wire and security forces packing mace cannons. These people just don’t get along.

So with the Texas Longhorns having a successful two-year run as SC cluster champion, it’s bound to attract the attention of the Sooners, who have a burning desire to dethrone it.

Team Sooner definitely came to play, and it's taking a page out of the Longhorn playbook. It's first competition configuration is using the Green Revolution immersion cooling solution that Texas used in the 2011 Battle of Seattle.

However, Oklahoma is going at it in a slightly different way. It's using the big Green Revolution mineral oil trough, but only filling it with five nodes, each equipped with dual 12 core Intel E5 CPUs, plus four Intel Phi co-processors.

The Team Sooner gear only takes up maybe a third of their mineral oil filled vat capacity, giving it a much higher liquid-to-hardware ratio than design specs for the enclosure. The Sooner see this giving them an edge over the competition, figuring that the greater liquid volume means it won’t have to run the liquid pumps and radiator fans much, if at all, meaning more power for computing rather than cooling.

In the upcoming “Meet Team Sooner” video, you’ll see its configuration and hear our discussion of how this might play in its favour.