SC08 is over for this year. The competition ended officially 4PM Friday. We ended up stopping the RAxML job we were running for 40 straight hours; it didn’t look like it was going to finish at all. In the end, we didn’t complete a single dataset.

The Taiwanese team from Tsing Hua University did help us improve our HPC score significantly, though. Some of their team captains came over and helped us tweak our build scripts, and, after rerunning the benchmark, our GLOPS improved from 16 to 205. That’s a huge improvement for some minor tweaking, but you have to know exactly what to change. The Taiwanese team had the expertise, and our team was very grateful to them for it.

After the competition ended, the organizers took us to a bowling alley/arcade/Laser Tag/rock climbing place. Laser Tag was fun (our team won!) but the rock climbing was the best.

We spent Thursday hanging out in our booth, explaining our setup to anyone who wandered past, and generally beginning to pack up. The Purdue team had Lance Armstrong’s team power their cluster with bikes while they ran a computation, but I slept through it.

The awards ceremony started at 1:30. I predicted the Taiwanese team would win, but the combined Indiana University and Technische Universität Dresden team won - big congrats to them. They spent a lot of time carefully tuning their applications, and they were very well prepared.

After some great BBQ tonight, we’re on our way home tomorrow morning - overall, it’s been a fun week. Austin is a really fun city, and the weather down here is excellent. SC09 is in Portland, Oregon, next year, perhaps I’ll be there as well.