Student Cluster Competition        

When Team EAFIT boards their first flight en route to Salt Lake City at 1 a.m. Friday, Nov. 11 (after driving an hour to the airport), they will not only have several members from last year's team, but they will also be bringing insight gleaned from members of Universidad EAFIT's first foray in the Student Cluster Competition at SC14 in partnership with Purdue University. Together, they think this combination will help in the competition.

In fact, the SC15 team members really didn't know each other until last year when their application to participate in the Student Cluster Competition was accepted. Since then, they have become friends, hanging out after work and later they joined EAFIT's computing center by different means, becoming the second generation of sys admins at the center. "Then we inherited the knowledge and wisdom from the first generation that also participated in this competition some time ago, and finally our team became bigger with the arrival of new teammates that made our team stronger."

After their first flight gets them to El Salvador, they will board a plane bound for Los Angeles and finally make it to Salt Lake City at 10 p.m. Once the team arrives in Salt Lake City, they are looking forward to raising the visibility of their country and university's name with the international HPC community, as well as "interacting with different cultures and learning the most we can about them." Reflecting their pride in Universidad EAFIT, the leading private university in Medellin, they are competing as Team EAFIT.

They are looking to each team member's own interest in different aspects of HPC to give them an edge. "Those interests are united in order to transcend the limits of our current abilities and make of us better not only technically, but as part of the HPC community."

While they take the competition seriously and like to work together as a team, they also enjoy making fun of things they see as nonsense. "We make fun of ourselves without disregarding any of the team members. We enjoy going out and eating outside, especially at each semester's end, and celebrating our members birthdays."

And although they each like to listen to different kinds of musing ranging from rock to pop to metal to rap to salsa, they have agreed on Queen’s "Don't Stop Me Now" as their theme song. "We are really excited to participate in this competition, and we believe this song can explain this feeling best."