Winter Classic Studio Update Show Archive

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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)…

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…

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…

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,…

We caught up with Team barraCUDA before the final judging interview and kicked around what’s been going on with them. I gave them a scoring update up through the AWS…

This is another solid team from UNM, with some students who have HPC book learning, but others who were in previous competitions, both Winter Classic and SC events. They also…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Our student teams get a lot of real-world HPC experience in the course of the three-month Winter Classic cluster competition. They get to run on five different supercomputers, are trained…

With the HPL/HPCG challenge in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to meet the HPE mentors who made it happen. Most of the mentor crew have taken on the task in…

The first task for students in every student cluster competition? Put a stake in the ground with solid LINPACK and HPCG benchmark scores. Our Winter Classic HBCU and HIS (Hispanic…