SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec. 6 -- The HPC Advisory Council, a leading worldwide organization for high-performance computing research, development, outreach and education, today announced that the Student Cluster Competition team from the University of Colorado has received the Fan Favorite Award. The award was given to the team with the most votes collected from SC10 attendees throughout the three days of competition.

The Student Cluster Competition is a unique opportunity for universities to increase their high-performance education, experience and partnerships with commercial vendors. The HPC Advisory Council sponsored the University of Colorado throughout the entire year in order to maximize the educational opportunities and strengthen the relationship with the student team as part of the HPC Advisory Council outreach and educational programs. The council utilized generous donations from AMD (NYSE: AMD), Dell, Fusion-io and Mellanox Technologies (NASDAQ: MLNX; TASE: MLNX) in order to provide the University with the computer systems suitable for the competition.

"The partnership with the HPC Advisory Council and the sponsoring vendors enabled the students to develop relationships within the HPC educational and vendor community and learn from the multitude of their available talent and resources," said Doug Smith, HPC administrator for the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "It was a pleasure to work with such a vast array of expertise and the amount our students learned in such a short period of time is invaluable to furthering their experience and careers within the HPC field."

"One of the main goals of the HPC Advisory Council is HPC outreach and education, bringing both HPC into education and education into HPC," said Gilad Shainer, HPC Advisory Council Chairman. "Working with the University of Colorado throughout the year was a great experience for both sides. We look forward to continuing this great collaboration and to extend our support to universities worldwide."

The Council would like to thank AMD, Dell, Fusion-io and Mellanox Technologies for the SC10 Student Cluster Competition support.

"We applaud the outstanding efforts of all the students, universities, and various vendors who participated in the SC10 Student Cluster Competition," said Jay Owen, director, External Research Office, AMD. "AMD strongly believes in a collaborative, industry-wide approach to solving new computing problems like power management, heterogeneous computing and parallel programming. This program is a great way to develop interest and strong curricula in HPC and is of benefit to our entire community."

"The annual SC Cluster Challenge represents an outstanding collaboration between industry and academia, supporting the next generation of users in building complex systems against stringent boundaries, in order to showcase our leading edge technology and capabilities with student experts in a completely live, highly competitive, environment," said Donnie Bell, senior group manager, HPC Solutions, Dell Inc.

"The close of this year's SC challenge awarding the CU team as Fan Favorite was momentous for the entire program and a great tribute to the students," Bell continued. "The team exemplified the core values of Council and HPC community - inclusive of donating their own sponsor equipment and assuring a competing team remained in the week long challenge. CU, the Florida A&M students and all of partners represented the best of the spirit of supercomputing -- demonstrating exceptional leadership, collaboration and collective ingenuity; altogether exceeding the challenge criteria itself and moving toward the promise for our future HPC leaders from whom we will all ultimately benefit."

"As is the case with all transformative technologies, it's very important to take your message not just to today's industry leaders, but also the next generation of engineers who will be implementing in the field what they are innovating today in academia," said Tyler Smith, vice president of alliances for Fusion-io. "We are proud of the work that the University of Colorado team accomplished under the guidance of the HPC Advisory Council, integrating Fusion's ioMemory with leading edge technologies from Mellanox, Dell and AMD. Tomorrow's global economy depends on innovations like these, and Fusion-io is pleased to work closely with these CU students, the HPC Advisory Council and other forward-thinking organizations as they continue to engineer the future of HPC."

"We were proud to provide the high-performance networking infrastructure for the University of Colorado's Cluster Challenge team," said John Monson, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "We applaud the University of Colorado for standing out as a fan favorite during the SC10 Student Cluster Challenge, and we are encouraged to see the HPC community foster such a vibrant program for our upcoming HPC stars."

The University of Colorado and the HPC Advisory Council have already agreed to continue the educational relationship through 2011, sponsoring the team for the SC11 Student Cluster Competition. Universities worldwide are encouraged to participate in the SC11 Student Cluster competition. For equipment or support, send a request to info@hpcadvisorycouncil.com. For more information about the council activities, visit the HPC Advisory Council website.

About the HPC Advisory Council

The HPC Advisory Council's mission is to bridge the gap between high-performance computing (HPC) use and its potential, bring the beneficial capabilities of HPC to new users for better research, education, innovation and product manufacturing, bring users the expertise needed to operate HPC systems, provide application designers with the tools needed to enable parallel computing, and to strengthen the qualification and integration of HPC system products. For more information about the HPC Advisory Council, visit www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com.

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Source: HPC Advisory Council