Bringing disruptive technology to competition

Supercomputing conference. Students from Purdue University made up one of seven teams of undergraduates to compete in the competition. Wanting a change of pace from the commodity hardware of the first challenge, Purdue teamed up with their vendor SiCortex, Inc. Students were then given the task of learning scientific applications POY, OpenFOAM, RAxML, WPP, and GAMESS, along with the HPC challenge benchmark suite. In this paper, students from the Purdue Cluster Challenge team discuss the work done in preparation of the competition, along with strategies and their effect on the outcome of the Cluster Challenge. I