The ISC Student Cluster Challenge kicked off last night in a unique manner. Rather than a simple shouted “Go!” or a loud tone sent over a bullhorn, the organizers confronted the university teams with a physical challenge, like the old Le Mans auto races. Each team had to run the show floor to gather six matching shirts (one for each team member). Once they had a shirt for each team member, they could begin to work on their first computing challenge – running HPCC and turning in the highest LINPACK score.

In the video, Brian Sparks (one of the chief organizers) and I provide relatively lame play-by-play as the various teams either rush or amble their way through the T-shirt gathering. The first team back with their shirts was China’s NUDT, closely followed by home team KIT from Germany, Tsinghua from China, and Stony Brook. Colorado came in last, but was only maybe five minutes behind their competitors. We harassed one of the Colorado team members, but he proved to be unflappable... or he just thought we were stupid. Probably both.