A Blog

So, I didn’t have much of a chance to update the blog with blow-by-blow action updates at SC this year.. Oops. However, the show was a blast. The Purdue team won the “lowest power consumption” award. It was certainly a surprise, given another team had a generally more efficient power design. In any case, we’re certainly happy we won an award.

I did not get much of a chance to walk around the floor between working both of Purdue’s booths. However, I did hear about and see one or two interesting things. The first was the new ethernet gear coming out of Voltaire. They can confederate several of their switch chassises to form a virtual switch that allows an LACP bond between the chassises to be active-active, which seems to be all the rage these days. After visiting the Voltaire booth, Cisco also has various solutions.. from the virtual port channel on the nexus gear and the virtual switch chassis on the catalyst gear. Also, it appears that perhaps Cisco will be implementing something like Woven’s multi-path layer 2 magic, so that could be fun too.

Lastly, the most interesting company on the floor that I saw was the “Two Guys and a Cluster” folks. Really, it’s just two guys that live on opposite coasts that help people acquire and run clusters. They seem to be a nice middle ground between a value-added cluster vendor and just buying hardware off a website and doing it all yourself. Their web address, with the start of an interesting blog, can be found here.

The day started early with the team wondering to the convention center to start validating all our applications. We found that the center’s power dropped voltage under load enough to cause us to overshoot our current problems badly. After taking account of all our hardware, we removed some memory and turned off our spare hardware which solved our problems.

At the end of the day, everything was good to go for the morning when we start running our benchmark for the judging. I’ll leave you with a picture of our booth this year:

After getting up at 3AM eastern time to make our flight at 6AM, the Purdue Student Cluster Challenge team made it to Portland, Oregon, on time and not terribly tired. The challenge organizers had our box sitting in our booth and we took no time in starting to unbox it.

For now, here is a link that talks about the challenge for this year: InsideHPC.