Bitwrangler

HPC Meets Scrapheap Challenge

HPCwire brought something back to the front of thought process today with their article on the SC2008 Cluster Challenge.  The challenge is in it's second year and it is an attempt to demonstrate the "democratization of supercomputing" whatever that means.  In essence, you take a group of students, a rack of gear and you run some codes in a timed event that starts with step 1) Un-crate the hardware.  Except for the hardware coming from some sponsorship and being production level stuff, it struck me as a high tech version of the BBC  Scrapheap Challenge (definitely not the horrid Americanized version Junk Yard Wars) program from the turn of the century. 

For the un-initiated, in Scrapheap Challenge, two teams were given a task, 24 hours and a literal junk yard of resources to build the project.  Each team had an expert in the field of study and any task specific supplies that wouldn't be normally found in the junk yard were usually hidden in the junk yard.  They built sub-marines, salvage rigs capable of picking a car up off the bottom of a lake, rockets, punkin' chunkers, all sorts of geek engineering (mostly guy) fun.  Mostly it illustrated the difference between mechanical engineering (we build projectiles and things that throw them) and civil engineering (we build targets).  In a way that only the Brits can do really well, all of the desperation, mistakes and false starts were shown in detail and in the end, the result usually worked within reasonable levels of success.  The US version was just a little too sanitized for my taste.

So, I think this cluster challenge could have some of those great earmarks without (hopefully) the sparks of SHC.  It seems that there is a lot of preparation that went into year one, so a lot of the drama should be behind the teams.  Murphy loves trade shows however and I suspect there will be un-expected events to follow. 

I regret not having time to invest in the event during the Reno show last year.  Frankly it got lost in the fine madness that is the Super Computing conference.  I will attempt to follow it a little more closely this year because it just seems like good old fashioned geek fun.  Of course there is this nagging little customer install that is scheduled to heat up about then....

So, stay tuned and keep the propeller on your cap spinning please. 

Posted at 08:45PM May 27, 2008 in Sun  |  Comments[0]