After setup yesterday, we returned to the Hotel at 2AM. I slept for 3.5 hours, and then went back to the convention center for the start of the competition. We’re having some network trouble, but not anything that would be unworkable.

Our situation is much worse than last year.

A couple of months ago, one group from MIT asked if I wanted to assist their team in the competition. They had some plans for using GPUs from ATI to build a cluster. I wasn’t so sure about that idea, but of course I was open to helping. A bit later, the first person I spoke to connected me with our current advisor, Kurt. Kurt told me the GPU thing fell through, and they were going to go with a similar configuration to the one that Stony Brook had last year at SC07. I agreed, I never liked the GPU idea.

MIT also agreed to cover everything for two more non-undergrad advisors from Stony Brook (only undergrads can compete). We also had minimal remote access to the similar hardware - we were only given hardware the morning we arrived.

At our arrival in Austin, we discovered the entire MIT team had bailed. There were some politics involving a $30 million NSF grant, the GPUs, and what seems like inter-research group politicking at MIT. As a result, I was the MIT team. Our two SBU advisors would have to leave the booth once the competition started.

Fortunately, we able to snag two members from our team from last year; they were at the conference to help organize and assist in other parts, but we were able to have them join the team. So, I’m not the only MIT team member any more, but the entire MIT team is composed of SBU students. The only MIT person here is our advisor. In fact, the team is almost the same team we had last year.

We are not doing to well on the hardware front either. Last year, we had 12 nodes with dual quad-core Xeons. This year we have 4 nodes with dual quad-core Opterons. This is about a third of the configuration from last year. The other teams have crazy setups that far outpower ours. All this, combined with a prep time of exactly one day (compared to the Indiana + Dresden teams’ 4 months) we aren’t likely to accomplish much this time around.

Bummer.

I am looking forward to all the post-competition parties, though.