at the competition teams have to perform tasks and to do them they have to build a supercomputer (the team is quick to point out that when you say supercomputer it conjures up images in popular culture of a room of servers or ibms watson but these computers for the competition are just two nodes compared to large supercomputers that can have hundreds) to build that supercomputer the team will pick from a list of available hardware before the competition that hardware will be in boxes at the competition and they have to assemble the computer the key is that the power consumption cannot exceed 3 000 watts so teams have to select what combination of parts will best accomplish the tasks while staying below that threshold the tasks involve running several different programs that use significant computing resources some of the programs take more central processing unit (cpu) power and others more graphic processing unit (gpu) power then teams have to find ways to optimize the way those programs run on the systems should you put more cpus in there or gpus said tao thats what you have to decide they just give you boxes and you have to assemble it yourselves and install the software and optimize it yourself its a very cool challenge the wildcard round at the finals is a mystery challenge that teams have no way to prepare for they know that the other tasks will be using the same programs they used in the preliminary round but the mystery task will be what separates the teams at the finals everyone is going in blind said senior computer science major mohammad sagor it could be hit or miss we all have our various things that were working on and how to optimize that but thats going to be a game changer and on top of that its with hardware weve never used before so thats another layer adding yet another layer is the fact that the internet itself is more heavily censored in china than it is in the united states there are some restrictions on the internet in china so its not as simple as just looking something up here said sheldon wei another freshman on the team thats something were going to have to figure out on the fly because theres no way to prepare for that really being able to look things up is a crucial part of the challenge according to junior computer engineering major sean dormiani because the installing the software portion of the competition isnt like installing a new program on your regular desktop computer installing software sounds simple because youre used to clicking next but when youre compiling it from the source its not the same he said its a very minimal front end its all text there are no buttons its like building a tower and youre supposed to build the top but you need everything underneath it and sometimes its not documented what you need underneath it so youre like ‘im missing a floor here whats going on and sometimes you end up finding one guy on one forum somewhere that has the same problem and theyve found a solution theyre also just excited to be the first texas a&m team to ever compete at the event were going to introduce texas a&m to the competition and im excited about that said sophomore computer engineering major shaina le its really inspiring to have a bunch of teams come together and even though were competing against each other and against the clock were all working toward the same end goal of sustainability efficiency and optimization its all about the bigger picture and i think thats wonderful the team has been supported by texas a&m high performance research computing and members also include senior computer science major isaac decastro senior electrical engineering majors michael hagaman samra tariq and alexander ngo and freshman engineering student zengyu wei