BSC-UPC team receives ISC2016 Student Cluster Competition Fan Favorite award

23 June 2016

The award is given to the team which receives the most unique votes from ISC participants during the Student Cluster Competition.

(via Mont-Blanc project)

Thunderstruck, the team from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC), has been named ‘Fan Favorite’ in the ISC-HPCAC Student Cluster Competition.  The award is given to the team which receives the most unique votes from ISC participants during the Student Cluster Competition.

‘Leading this team has been a great educational challenge and, above all, an honour for the students’ other advisor Daniel Ruiz and myself,’ says Filippo Mantovani, advisor of the Thunderstruck team. ‘All the members gave their best in the months before the competition, dedicating a significant amount of their free time to make this adventure in Frankfurt possible. During the competition we managed to complete and submit all the assignments on time, proving the great integration work done by the E4 Computer Engineering cluster and showing that ARM technology is ready to compete in the HPC arena. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the ISC attendees who visited our booth, showed interest in our work and supported us.”

This is the second time the UPC team has competed in the ISC-HPCAC Student Cluster Competition, the fifth edition of which was held during this week’s ISC16 conference. The purpose of this friendly and spirited competition is to introduce the next generation of students to the HPC community and its technology. The Spanish team from UPC took part with a total of 12 student teams in real time over a three-day period. Competing directly with another team with an ARM-based architecture, the Spanish team built a 64-bit ARM computer cluster and ran a series of HPC benchmarks and applications. This year’s Spanish team was formed by the following UPC students: Juan Francisco Martínez, Kevin Sala Penadés, Sandra Corella Pérez, Elisabet V. Breix, Yinghao Xu and Josep Castro Salvadó, with Filippo Mantovani and Daniel Ruiz acting as advisors. The team was sponsored by Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the European project Mont-Blanc  and companies including ARM, E4 and CoolIT Systems.

The Mont-Blanc project would like to congratulate the whole team on their success.