Team Information
Location: Fayetteville, North Carolina
Established: 1867
Enrollment: 6,726
Mascots: The Bronco
This is the second Winter Classic competition for Fayetteville State University and they’re coming with a team composed of all senior Computer Science majors. They had a middle of the pack finish in 2022, which isn’t surprising for a brand new team, but this is a new year and anything can happen. We’re glad they’re back and we’re looking forward to seeing what this team can do.
2024 Fayetteville Parallel Pathfinder Roster:
"Hi, my name is Antonio Colin Ball. I am a Computer Science major at Fayetteville State University about to Graduate with my Bachelors Degree. I have a strong interest in Robotics , Networking and overall problem solving. In the future I want to do something fun but also challenging. Some of my technical skills are that I am good in Python, C, C++, and Java."
"My name is Zach Delaney, I am a senior in my final semester at Fayetteville State University majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Cybersecurity. I plan on attending graduate school at Georgia Tech doing the OMSCS program in the fall to get my masters in Computer Science. At Fayetteville State I took up a research position with the Intelligent Systems Lab and have mostly been working with object detection research. I've enjoyed my work in the competition and the work in my parallel programming classes and hope to pursue a job in HPC. I am an avid golfer and have a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu."
"My name is Raymond Poythress. I am a senior at Fayetteville State University majoring in Computer Science. My interest includes sports and music. I have a 9 year old, so I play a lot of basketball, baseball and soccer. I also enjoy playing the guitar. In the future, I'd like to have a career as a software developer. Currently I work at Fayetteville State University's Intelligence Systems Lab. In the lab we work with AI object-detection and color detection, machine Learning, geospatial mapping, and much more. I am also part of a team outside the lab that is developing a video game using Unity."
Faculty Advisors/Coaches:
- Dr. Mingxian Jin
- Dr. Albert Chan
2022 Team Fayetteville
Team Fayetteville: It’s a Greek lunch for Team Fayetteville in the fashionable Greek District of Fayetteville, NC. (Full disclosure: I have no evidence to support the claim that there’s a Greek District in Fayetteville or that it’s fashionable.) The team is together and having a good time as they share a Greek pizza slathered with cheese and chicken – it looks pretty good.
Although it might not show in the leaderboard, Team Fayetteville is one of the teams that has come the farthest during the competition. In the first events, I had the sense that the team was struggling just to get the apps to run, much less able to optimize them. But they worked with our HPC Seal Team Six BioTeam before the NASA NAS Par benchmarks and it really paid off – Fayetteville had the highest score on one the BT-MZ section of the module. They also nailed a fourth-place finish on both the AMD and Intel portions of the AWS OpenFOAM Challenge. Nice work, Fayetteville!
Team Fayetteville Update: This is another team that has gotten stronger as the competition went on. The team, featuring the youngest player, a high school senior, is a great mix of experience – but none of them has gone down the HPC road prior to the Winter Classic. In the interview, they talk about what they’ve learned and their career aspirations.
Fayetteville State University: Newbies to the student cluster competition game, this is a four-person team that hasn’t had any previous experience with HPC but are eager to learn. Fayetteville has the youngest competitor, with one of their students being senior in high school. They also have an armed forces veteran from Fort Bragg competing after 15 years in the military. The team finished the initial HPL/HPCG benchmarks ut didn’t have time and optimization expertise to put up upper echelon scores. Our special HPC Seal Team Six, the folks from BioTeam, are parachuting in to help Fayetteville develop their HPC optimization chops.