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This edition of the Matadors are totally new to HPC (and even Linux), but have picked up the basics under the tutelage of team coach (and former competitor) Michael Beebe. Despite that, the team is doing decently in the early going with an overall seventh place finish after LINPACK and HPCG. It was a fun…

This is the returning 2024 champion and has a chance to become the first repeat champ in the Winter Classic. All the students are new but they do have at least a smattering of HPC experience. Whatever they have, it’s working for them. They turned in the second place LINPACK score, behind the Roadrunners by…

Quick story about how UC Riverside made their way into the Winter Classic. It started in a hotel lobby bar at SC24 in Atlanta. HPC education mainstay Elizabeth Leake introduced me to a UC Riverside student who had never heard of the Winter Classic but wondered if he could get a team together. I gave…

Very solid team with good HPC and this isn’t their first cluster competition rodeo. They’ve been in the Winter Classic since 2022 and have also sent teams to the SC competitions a couple of times. They’ve been a bit snakebit in this Winter Classic, however, turning in a, well, bad LINPACK score. I think it…

This team is also chock full of students who are new to HPC and drinking from the firehose that is the Winter Classic. We met each of the students and kicked around how much fun it was to watch 16.5 hours of HPC training and then take an exam on it. The team did well…

Fayetteville State University sent two teams to the Winter Classic this year, and they’re both very solid. Like most of the teams, these students don’t have a lot of HPC experience, but they’re pushing hard to learn. So far, the results have been great. They finished fourth on LINPACK but dropped down to seventh on…

The Santa Cruz “Not So Slow Slugs” always field highly competitive teams. In the last two Winter Classic competitions, they finished a close second – missing by .6 of a point in 2024. This year they’re returning to right that wrong, and they’re bringing back some experienced players and very solid newbies. They’re not the…

This is one of two teams from Cal State University Channel Islands, located in lovely Camarillo, CA. While Channel Islands has been sending two teams to the Winter Classic since 2022, most of the students on this team are new to HPC and Linux, but they do have a few who have some level of…

The second team from Chanel Islands, Nautical Processing, brings six newbies to the world of HPC/AI. One funny thing that comes up in the interview is that two of the team members couldn’t say for sure if they were juniors or seniors right now. Seems like it’s a topic of debate with school administration. I…

In their fourth outing as a Winter Classic mentor, AWS brought in challenge that, on the surface at least, looked deceptively simple. The students were tasked with setting up a cloud instance (aided by a step-by-step guide) and then run WRF with the provided dataset. Their run had to be completed within 4:30 to be…