As a long term fan and media-professional within the Student Cluster Competitions all over the world, Dan and I have a chat about where it came from, what the challenges are and a lot more.

The first podcast in which I talk significantly less then the guest.

Sorry for the buzzing, not sure where this comes from. :/

Show-notes

The show notes represent the original agenda, we pivoted a little bit here and there. :D

Introduction

• Dan Olds, Partner at OrionX
• Started at Sequent Computer
• Iterated to Sun, IBM
• He graduated in non-IT?

History of SCC

• When was the first time Dan entered it (founding father?)
• How is the 40k foot trajectory, did you ever though: Oh, now it’s clear in which direction it is going
  • differences between ISC and SC
• the rules? - power - team size - team members (undergraduates only) - standard challenges (HPL, HPCG, …)
• Did it went from a free-exchange of ideas into a competition, I hope not?

System used

• System-Architecture (x86, ARM)
• Accelerators (GPU,GPGPU, SoC)
• Interconnects
• OS’s used?

Low-Power SoC

• I want ARM coming
• Can I Haz a low-power HPI?

Auxiliary DC Services within SCC

• Capitalism to blame for bad operational stacks? (Have you ever seen a good Ops-Stack provided by a vendor?)
• How does it pan out in SCC, is the stacks they use a reflection of what is out there in big-scale systems?

Challenges within the Challenge

• getting it to work at all
• being able to pivot when magical workload comes in
• be nice to one another, solving problems together
• do you see teams being trained for a particular skill, failing when there is a change
• do you see members of a team specialise or is the team homogeneous?

Containers

• Have to talk about how to push containers in.. :)