The first Cluster Challenge was hold in conjunction with the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing Conference 2007 in Reno. Six teams, consisting of six undergraduate students per team, were competing with their self-designed cluster systems to solve real-world scientific computing. They had 48 hours to finish as many datasets as possible from a selection multiple data sets that would take six months to be solved on a single CPU.

Indiana University started with six undergraduate students and one-third female students. Btw., we were the only team with female students at the challenge. I was co-advising the team with P. Kambadur under the lead of Prof. Lumsdaine.

The event got some press attention, but our team was certainly referenced most :)
Ars Technica
O'Reilly Net
Mac Observer
Indiana Daily Student
it.iu.edu
The Register

Some pictures of our experiences are shown below:
Our team and our cluster!
During the contest ... sometime around midnight ... oh man, this sleep deprivation was so bad! Btw., that seems to be the ultimate fanpic (? I've seen it on several laptops ? ;).
After the contest ... too bad that we didn't win!

More pictures: C. Eller's pics;  Joe's pics;  Adam's pics;  Val's pics