The SC16 SCC marks the fifth time students from the University of Texas at Austin have competed and this year they are teaming up with Texas State University. To reflect their interschool association of the two schools and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), they named their group “Team Texas”, and extended the theme to their cluster, naming it “cowboy” and “deputies.”
Through their affiliation with TACC, they’re able to tap into a lot of amazing resources, giving them time to work with production large-scale cluster systems even before they had access to any hardware for the team’s cluster. They figure that will give them an advantage over other teams who might not have access to these kinds of resources. Given their high-flying approach to preparation, it’s not surprising their theme song is “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins.
“We are looking forward to a lot of things at SCC, particularly learning more about bleeding edge high performance computing technologies and seeing how ‘cowboy’ stacks up against the competition. Additionally we are looking forward to the job fair, where many of us are looking for positions.”
For some of the team members, SC16 will be their first trip to an academic conference and the state of Utah, “so we look forward to seeing how the conference is run and the scenery of the area.” It will only take them three hours to make the flight to Salt Lake City, one of the shorter routes.
In their limited free time, team members do a variety of things for fun, including working on small software design projects, cooking, and sketching. One interesting fact that emerged as the team developed is that five out of our six members have a “J” in their name: Joe, Joseph, José, Josh and CJ.
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