The Cluster Challenge: 6 Students, 26 Amps, 44 Hours

The inaugural Cluster Challenge competition at the Super- computing 2007 conference saw six teams, each with six undergraduate students, compete to complete a computational science workload within 44 hours. The HPCC benchmarks, GAMESS, POP, and POV-Ray ap- plications formed the workload. One constraint on the cluster was that it had to draw less than 26 amps total at 120 volts. The University of Alberta team placed first in the 2007 challenge. We describe our SGI and Linux-based cluster environment, our experi- ences with hardware and software in preparation for the challenge, and our experiences during the challenge itself. To seasoned cluster adminis- trators and users, many of our observations are familiar, but the Cluster Challenge is an interesting data point in the state (both good and bad) of cluster technology (hardware and software).