Welcome everybody to the next lecture of Architectural Supercomputers.

Before we start with the actual lecture, I would like to introduce you to a different

subject.

In about one and a half weeks, I will be flying to New Orleans to a conference and also to

a competition, to the student cluster competition.

Does any one of you know the student cluster competition?

Okay, that's good, sir.

I won't be boring you with the details.

The student cluster competition is an annual event where teams from all over the world

compete for about a week to compute as much workload on their self-designed cluster computer.

It always takes place in the US during the supercomputing conference.

This year it is in New Orleans.

Last year our university was participating for the first time.

Last year the competition was in Denver.

We are currently seeking new students for the student team because it's always difficult

actually to find students.

Which surprises me because in essence students get paid for the whole trip.

They get the trip for free and the competition is a lot of fun.

Perhaps the reason why it's hard to find students is that it's also a lot of work.

But I would like to show you some pictures of last year's competition to show that it's

not just work but it's also fun.

This is a picture taken before we left airline.

We bought a new machine.

This looks actually pretty tiny but it's a lot of equipment and pretty little space.

We called our computer Siegfried and our team was called Team Kraut Computing.

It was a bit of a pun on cloud computing which was a huge hype last year and continues to

be this year.

This is actually Chris and Lucas who were applying the name to the machine.

These are some more pictures of the preparation.

Most of the students were from the computational engineering course but we also had one student

who was studying electrical engineering and also one computer science student.

When we got the machine it was packed in this large box.

Our problem was we got the machine so late that we couldn't ship it with the usual shipping

servers.

What we did instead was we packed it into smaller bags and took it with me on the plane

which was afterwards pretty crazy because it doesn't look that much but it was close

to 100 kilograms so it was really a lot of weight.

I even bought a hand cart to pull it along which seemed easier than it actually was because

these wheels work very good on solid ground.

When you go outside it's not always solid, it's not always very flat so it was difficult.

But this is again an airline at the bus stop which was the first challenge.

This is already a picture in Denver when the bags came through the bulky luggage.

I had to wait 30 minutes for the bags to arrive.

I was already worried and I was already thinking we won't get our machine.

The problem was the machine was worth about 40,000 US dollars so losing it or breaking

it was absolutely not an option.

I was really, really nervous.

This is another picture.

One of the benefits of traveling is that you get to see some beautiful sights.

I think this is again a bus stop.