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Students Utilize Raritan Rack PDUs to Power High Performance Computing Competition

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Gento

Raritan was thrilled to take part in this year’s high performance computing Student Cluster Competition. The event, which took place this past November at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, takes some of the best and brightest high school and undergraduate students from around the world and introduces them to the high performance computing community.

The theme of this year’s conference was HPC Matters and its organizers note:

HPC is helping to solve our hardest problems in the world. Innovations from our community have far reaching impact in every corner of science, all the way to investment banking, in the discovery of new drugs, to the precise prediction of the next superstorm. For more than two decades, the SC Conference has been the place to build and share the innovations that are making these life-changing discoveries possible.

Raritan supplied two of its intelligent rack power distribution units to students from Western Australia working in conjunction with iVEC who in turn was sponsored by SGI. The real-time 48-hour challenge requires students to put together a computing cluster on the exhibit floor and demonstrate sustained performance across a series of applications using commercially available components.

One key aspect of the challenge is that the teams have a power limit of 26 amps at 120 volts they are unable to exceed. Should they exceed this limit more than three times during the competition, they are automatically disqualified. Ergo, the ability to reliably distribute power and perform real-time power monitoring was critical during the event: both standard capabilities of all Raritan rackmount power strips.