Student Cluster Competition        

When asked to provide an interesting fact about their group, Team SegFAUlt from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Germany was tempted to write a funny story, but then remembered, "We're German - we are efficient and have no sense of humor! ;)." For the university’s third time in the SCC, they wanted to come up with a team name that was characteristic, but also smart and easy to remember. The name of choice became "Team SegFAUlt," which includes both the abbreviation of the university, FAU, and the common word for a segmentation fault in computing indicating a memory access violation.

"As every programmer knows segfaults, and has probably dealt with them a dozen times before, we think the combination is perfect. It both distinguishes us as members of our university, and reflects our interest in computer science and programming. Lastly, it gives our team a certain recognition value."

As for their secret sauce, the team is counting on the diverse backgrounds of its members, including computer science, computational engineering, business informatics and medical engineering, giving them a good mixture between knowledge in different areas of computing, project organization and technical expertise. "Lastly, we think our long preparation and motivation are the keys which will make us successful." And as they are looking at all the pieces falling neatly into place, they identified the Tetris theme as their their song.

Since this will be the first trip to the U.S. for most of the team members, they are looking forward to experiencing American culture and the way of life. And they’re really looking forward to the challenges of the competition and meeting interesting people in HPC and doing some networking with an eye on their careers. The team will travel 14.5 hours to get to the conference.

Team members span a range of ages and interests. While the average age is 24.5 years, the age difference between the youngest and oldest members is 12 years, longer than Youtube has been around. Here’s what the team members do for fun:

• Marcel: Watching movies, playing Warhammer, changing diapers of his little daughter
• Kai: Shooting sports, dancing, video games
• George: Programming, making pizza, watching movies
• Markus: Table tennis, rock climbing, fiddling around
• Benedikt: Mountain biking, programming, community volunteer service
• Jan: Rock climbing, squash, volleyball