Student Cluster Competition        

The University of Utah is fielding a team for the first time and expect to have a couple of home-field advantages. First, their "secret sauce" is Utah fry sauce, a mix of mayonnaise, ketchup and seasonings. Second, they say "But our real edge is that we trained at this altitude!" They are also guaranteed to not be suffering from jet lag.

For their team name, they drew on the university mascot, the Utes, and decided to call themselves the SupercompUtes. They then used the school's block U logo in place of the "U" and created a team logo incorporating the hexagonal honeycomb pattern of a beehive. Besides being Utah's state nickname (the Beehive State), the beehive is a classic icon of massive industrial coordination and productivity. As the team says, "Similar to compute clusters, bees must share resources, pass messages, and work in parallel to build the perfect hive. Moreover, like members of a beehive, our team comprises specialized skills and a variety of talents. Together we are a diverse yet integrated unit, capable of building an optimized environment through intelligent cooperation."

Team members are excited at the prospect of meeting students from all around the country/world and learning how they approached the different problems presented by the applications. They are also looking forward to learning about future career opportunities in high performance computing.

When not studying or preparing for the SCC, team members like to take advantage of the surrounding mountains, hiking, climbing, biking, and skiing. They also took the local route in selecting a theme song, "Warriors" by Imagine Dragons, a band that started in Utah. The team could also form their own band as members play ukulele, guitar, saxophone, piano, organ and drums.

Interesting fact #2: Most of our teammates have the letter "K" in their name, and several have a first name that begins with "K."