FAU team SegFAUlt competes in Student Cluster Competition (SCC) at ISC’20
The participation of “Team SegFAUlt” at the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) in the scope of the ISC’20 began as usual; finding interested students and forming a team had started in October 2019 already. Luckily, the team’s proposal was accepted and the selection of the team for participation in the SCC was announced at the SC’19 in Denver. Everything was working according to plan and we discussed the final hardware configuration at the beginning of the new year to best suit the (partially) still unknown applications, shipping and delivery was scheduled for early April. By that time — things changed. The competition was, within just a few days, transferred from the usual “live and in booth” mode at the conference into the online world. This change lead to several new applications that needed to be addressed, while the hallmark part (for FAU), the HPL benchmark, was cancelled, along with the HPCG benchmark. Working online is not unusual for people in computer science but in this special situation the team was facing some severe difficulties that needed to be dealt with, not all of them related to the competition. Besides the change of organization and mode of the SCC, the students now had to prepare for new applications on a remote system in Singapore, while simultaneously attending (online) lectures and even preparing for and taking exams, which were shifted from their original dates to the most heated part of the online competition — all this without being able / allowed to meet as an actual team. All in all, this was an interesting, challenging and new “mode of operation” for everyone involved and we are lucky that the event was, unlike may others, not cancelled. For this, we are thankful to the quick reaction, extra effort and work of the organizers of the competition! This was certainly a whole new challenge for everyone involved, even experienced SCC participants.
Team SegFAUlt (SCC@ISC’20)
