Last night teams were given a green flag and set off on the 44 hour race. All teams completed the HPCC benchmarks by 1:00am and results were handed in to the judges. Teams were then given data sets for GAMESS, POP, and POVRay, and will spend the rest of the available time working through them.
Arriving back about 6am, we found a few team members in the ‘understudy’ position (crashed out on the floor, sofa or under the tables). About half were in the midst of a team change, so there were a few bright eyes available. One team was reported to have to pull a team members fingers off the keyboard and send them back to the hotel for some sleep (and to stay within the rules).
About 12:20 the convention center experienced loss of power, and the Cluster Challenge teams’ equipment all suffered a hard crash. Not all came back fully, and the teams are working on it. Some times real world things happen and we learn from it: at least one team is now using checkpoint features in some of the applications so they don’t lose much runtime should they have this issue again.
Visitors to the event are enthusiastic, and are having excellent interaction with the teams. Kudos to the teams for taking the time to answer visitor questions while they are in the middle of this race.
Brent
As one of the understudies here this morning, I can say that despite all the challenges, we're having a great time.
The power bump got a bit of coverage in The Register too - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/13/worlds_biggest_reboot/ - I commented that for many and/or all of us, the decision to not use a UPS was made because we didn't have room in the power budget.
Wow, its demo/showoff day already. During the power outage it seemed like time stood still but now looking back on it all its just a blur.
So have any results to the challenge been posted anywhere?
It was posted here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/11/team_canada_wins_the_cluster_c_1.html