Student Cluster Competition        

The team from Peking University is looking to make a powerful impression in their first run at the SCC. In fact, they are competing as Team POWERFUL. "We hope our powerful POWER machines may bring us the best performance in the competition." They are also bringing a powerful secret sauce with them: "We are probably the only team using POWER architecture with NVLINK-powered P100 accelerators, which will boost our benchmarks and applications greatly. And we designed a FPGA-based solution for the password-cracking task."

They are also ready for a new feature in this year's SCC – a sudden cut in power to all of the systems. "Our first trial of LINPACK benchmark ended in a sudden power outage over the whole floor because of the power overload, which is the first time we 'drilled' for the Power Shutoff Activity :-D."

Since this is the team's first time participating in the Student Cluster Competition and engaging in such a major international conference, they are "eagerly looking forward to gaining experience and broadening our minds and horizons in the HPC fields in SC16. As a newcomer to the SCC, we are hoping to learn from other teams all over the world."

But unlike other teams flying from distant countries, Team POWERFUL looks to make the trip from Beijing to Salt Lake City U.S. in a mere 57 minutes. Here’s how: "We are going to depart at 15:00 (Beijing Time, UTC+8), and we'll arrive at 15:57 the same day (Mountain Time, UTC-7)."

Here’s a look at how the team members like to spend their leisure time:

• Yilong: Watching TV animation and anisong lives
• Lei: Watching anime and reading light novels
• Wenbin: Playing badminton, watching anime and photography
• Zhuohan: Playing tennis
• Haoze: Reading books
• Zhenxin: Watching TV series like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

For their theme song, Team POWERFUL named "He's a Pirate" from the Pirates of the Caribbean film.