Team Information

Location: Fayetteville, North Carolina

Established: 1867

Enrollment: 6,726

Mascots: The Bronco

School motto:  “Deeds, not words” which is very apt for a student cluster competition and, really, all of life. This is their first official student cluster competition and they’re coming in with a team of four students and two faculty advisors.

Some more facts and figures about FSU, they have a low teacher to student ratio and the school offers 33 bachelor’s degrees along with 18 master’s degrees, which is a lot, we think, for a school this size. They’re also home grown with 94% of their student body coming from in-state. The school is known for being a great price-performer, ranked #1 by several sources as being the best bang for the buck in the region.

Their mascot is the Bronco, known as Mr. Bronco on campus. Pictured at left with who is, assumedly, Ms. Bronco, but they could just be friends, we don’t know and we’re not asking.

We’ll learn a lot more about the FSU Broncos in our follow up interviews. Stay tuned…..

2022 Team Fayetteville

  • Andres Ayala-Lagunas
  • David Abdo
  • Jean Paul Fermaint Hernandez
  • Octavia Riddick

Faculty Advisors/Coaches:

  • Dr. Albert Chan
  • Dr. Mingxian Min

Team Fayetteville:  It’s a Greek lunch for Team Fayetteville in the fashionable Greek District of Fayetteville, NC. (Full disclosure: I have no evidence to support the claim that there’s a Greek District in Fayetteville or that it’s fashionable.) The team is together and having a good time as they share a Greek pizza slathered with cheese and chicken – it looks pretty good.

Although it might not show in the leaderboard, Team Fayetteville is one of the teams that has come the farthest during the competition. In the first events, I had the sense that the team was struggling just to get the apps to run, much less able to optimize them. But they worked with our HPC Seal Team Six BioTeam before the NASA NAS Par benchmarks and it really paid off – Fayetteville had the highest score on one the BT-MZ section of the module. They also nailed a fourth-place finish on both the AMD and Intel portions of the AWS OpenFOAM Challenge. Nice work, Fayetteville!

Team Fayetteville Update:  This is another team that has gotten stronger as the competition went on. The team, featuring the youngest player, a high school senior, is a great mix of experience – but none of them has gone down the HPC road prior to the Winter Classic. In the interview, they talk about what they’ve learned and their career aspirations.

Fayetteville State University:  Newbies to the student cluster competition game, this is a four-person team that hasn’t had any previous experience with HPC but are eager to learn. Fayetteville has the youngest competitor, with one of their students being senior in high school. They also have an armed forces veteran from Fort Bragg competing after 15 years in the military. The team finished the initial HPL/HPCG benchmarks ut didn’t have time and optimization expertise to put up upper echelon scores. Our special HPC Seal Team Six, the folks from BioTeam, are parachuting in to help Fayetteville develop their HPC optimization chops.