Press Coverage

We’re finally at the end of the 81-day HPC-packed 2025 Winter Classic Invitational Student Cluster Competition. We had ten teams cross the finish line to complete the competition, which is admirable given that they were dealing with full-time course loads, outside jobs, family/friends, plus everything that goes with the competition on top. We had a…

I had a great conversation with Dr. Niraj Nepal and Valerie Rossi from PSC. Dr. Nepal is a condensed matter physicist at PSC, so he’s an expert in QE and probably runs it more than I run Excel. Valerie manages educational outreach programs at PSC, and has run a few student cluster competition teams, so…

It’s the final challenge reveal show for the 2025 Winter Classic, and I’m joined by Matt Ziegler, Lenovo’s head of Neptune liquid cooling and sustainability. Matt is basking in a light drenched room as the sun is reflecting off the snow outside. And he looks that bright AFTER I changed lighting and contrast levels on…

Let’s get this out of the way first:  this is a crappy video. I use Zoom and always set it to record to the cloud, which gives me separate video and audio streams. The local computer recording gave me one video and one audio stream. The team deserves better, damn it. A strongly worded letter…

Roadrunner Follow Up:  We take a walk down 2025 Winter Classic memory lane to kick off the follow up interview. It’s a pretty good journey; they held onto second through the first three modules, even with a stumble on the ORNL Quantum Challenge. AWS threw them a bit, as they focused on optimizing WRF rather…

We start the interview with a little discussion about the toughest part of the competition. For them, it’s been the logistics of scheduling time amongst themselves, which makes a lot of sense. As far as the individual challenges go, they saw the AWS WRF module as the most difficult. Not because it was hard, but…

The Red Raiders are nearing the end of a history making Winter Classic run. They’ve finished first or second in every module except the Oak Ridge Quantum Challenge (finished fourth) and have held the overall lead throughout the competition. They are on track to become the first team to win back-to-back Winter Classic championships, amazing!…

It had been quite a while since I checked in on the Matadors and a lot had happened. We started the conversation by discussing the HPC Crash Course, which they thought was very helpful. We also went over their results to date and hit on some topics like profiling (this came up a lot during…

We had an interesting and dramatic late competition check in with Team Bronco-2. So what did they think of the Oak Ridge Quantum Challenge? Mind bending and hard to get a handle on in only a week. Absolutely right on that score. That one could have (should have) been tackled over two weeks rather than…

In our follow up with the Nautical Processing team, we talked a lot about what it meant to them to get some real keyboard time on a IQM quantum system, courtesy of ORNL and their Quantum Challenge. I asked them to talk about the most challenging part of the competition, which led to a conversation…