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AWS has been a Winter Classic mentor for three years now and their past challenges have roiled the leaderboard – and this year is no exception. The application? RELION, which stands for “REgularized Likelihood OptomizatioN. It’s used electron electron cryomicroscopy (getting stuff cold and then taking a really close look at it) to reconstruct the…

Oak Ridge National Laboratory marks their third year mentoring our student competitors in the Winter Classic student cluster competition. The Oak Ridge competition modules are always, well, different. They don’t ask students to optimize typical HPC applications or benchmarks. Nooo…that would be too easy. At Oak Ridge, they like to throw curve balls. Their first…

It’s time to reveal the results from the Oak Ridge competition module, well, it’s actually well past time. My day job and travel schedule have put me way behind, but I am dedicated to getting all this great content out way before the next competition begins. In this show, my special guest commentator is HPC…

This is the other team from University of New Mexico, since there are two, right? This team has some significant cluster competition experience with two veterans of previous Winter Classic and SC events. It’s a nice mix of newbies and vets. You’ll see from the video that HPC fever is taking hold, half the team…

This is the second time we’re seeing a team from Jackson State university. The team features two veterans of the 2023 Winter Classic, which should help, but it’s also a team whose members are involved in a lot of other activities – like bands and things like that – which makes getting together rough. We…

It was a quiet Valentine’s Day evening when I interviewed the UC Santa Cruz team. Since none of us seemed to have any plans, it seemed like a good time to do it. But there was some good news for the Santa Cruz team – they had just aced the NASA BTIO challenge, adding 100…

This is the second team from California State University, Channel Islands – or maybe it’s the first team? Not sure, but I do know they have two teams total and this is one of them. As you’ll see in the video interview below, the team members have widely ranging ambitions from aerospace to working with…

This is the other team from the University of New Mexico. I mistakenly thought that one of their team members was going to make history by being the first competitor to compete for two different schools – but I was wrong, oh well, it happens. But back to the Roadrunners – this is an impressive…

The folks at NASA Ames once again did a bang-up job as a mentor for the 2024 Winter Classic. This is the third time they’ve fulfilled this vital function, and their challenges keep getting better and better. In their first challenge, in 2022, they had the teams work with the NAS Parallel benchmarks, learning to…

In this edition of the Winter Classic Studio Update Show we reveal the results from the NASA BTIO Challenge. The benchmark, BTIO, is a subset of the NAS Parallel benchmark and NASA set up a formidable set of milestones, including a quiz, that ran students through a gamut of HPC-ery. (No, not a word, but…