Undergraduate experience in clustering at the SC07 Cluster Challenge

Abstract. The Cluster Challenge held at SC07 in Reno, Nevada pro-vided a unique opportunity for undergraduate students to build, bench-mark, and run real science applications on a state-of-the-art cluster of computers, while working with real-world constraints and interacting with experts in the high-performance computing field. After building a cluster, students ran the HPC Challenge benchmark and two days ’ worth of jobs for the applications POP, GAMESS, and POVRay. In this paper, students who participated in the Cluster Challenge describe the process for preparing for the competition, outline the work performed to un-derstand complex real-world codes, and report on lessons learned while preparing for and competing in the Cluster Challenge.