At 8pm Central Time today, the Gaussian Elimination Squad fought their first round of the Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge against the “Invincible Buckeyes,” representing the Ohio Supercomputing Center and Ohio State University, at the SC14 conference. I have to admit that I needed to look up “buckeye” in the dictionary, where I learned that “buckeye” is a tree (going by the scientific name “Aesculus“, also known as the “chestnut”) as well as a nickname for residents of the U.S. state of Ohio. Nice pun, but no match for the kick-ass, brilliancy-radiating nom de guerre of the German team!

Just as last year, this is a single-elimination tournament, with eight teams fighting one-on-one in seven matches. Each match consists of two parts. The first is a trivia round, with questions about computing, parallelism, the history of supercomputing, and the SC conference series. The faster you select the correct answer (out of four), the more points you collect. After the trivia we had a slight advantage, but there was no reason to be over-confident. In the second part, the coding challenge, we had ten minutes to parallelize and optimize a piece of code (that we hadn’t seen before, of course). In a team effort without equal we managed to get a mind-boggling 240x performance speedup compared to the original version on the Intel Xeon Phi! The Buckeyes were stuck at something like 6x. Hence, this round goes to The Squad, and we are eagerly looking forward to the semi-finals on Wednesday.