Many sysadmins no doubt will have wanted to fling a server from the top of a suitably tall building during moments of professional frustration, and now they can get the chance to chuck one competitively.

Attendees of the CloudFest 2024 conference in Germany on March 18-21 will be able to enter the World Server Throwing Championship (WSTC), according to the event's website.

Described as an "intense underground sport" that is "needlessly brutal to servers," the competition began more than ten years ago, with servers being tossed in secret back rooms of datacenters by the Dutch Cloud Community.

One Reg colleague found a
YouTube video of the Dutch Cloud Community event in action in the Netherlands, where most of the competitors appear to favor a two-handed grasp and sideways flick to get their hardware to go the distance, while others just adopt a straightforward fling.

As for the CloudFest contest, dubbed the World Server Throwing Championship (WSTC), it appears to be attempting to take the competition global, with the conference's site inviting attendees to apply for a slot to test their metal* in front of a live audience.

Up to 40 server-throwing athletes will get to show off their system-flinging prowess from 1730 CET on Tuesday, March 19, in a reserved area near the event's main entrance. Each thrower gets two attempts, and the furthest effort is recorded, with CloudFest promising to provide prizes for the top three tossers.

The invitation doesn't say whether competitors are all required to throw the same server, or if entrants are allowed to bring their own. The image on the website shows someone launching what appears to be a standard 1U rack-mount system, but we imagine you could easily beat that by flinging a microserver or a sled taken from a multi-node chassis. Alternatively, who wouldn't want to see someone chance their arm with an AS/400?

The Reg hopes that whatever hardware gets used has exhausted its useful lifecycle as we imagine this kind of treatment could well invalidate the warranty, or at the very least bring a new meaning to a system crash.

Anyone attending CloudFest can apply to take part here, but we suspect that by now all the server slots will have been filled.

However, if the satisfying thud of your pesky twin-socket nemesis hitting the ground hard isn't for you, perhaps you could try something more cerebral, such as Excel esports?

We last reported on this a couple of years ago. It was broadcast on the ESPN channel, with competitors battling to complete various Excel tasks. This isn't for the faint-hearted either as we break out into a cold sweat at the mere mention of pivot tables. ®

*Not a misspelling.

https://www.theregister.com//2024/03/06/cloudfest_server_tossing/