The HPC Advisory Council and ISC jointly held their 10th annual Student Cluster Competition in a stylish virtual form factor over the past couple of months.
The competition featured 12 teams from all over the world. It’s been billed as “The Clash of Champions” since seven of the competing teams have won Overall Champion awards over the past years.
Teams competed to run and optimize HPC benchmarks and a wide range of real-world HPC applications using two clusters, one at Singapore’s National Supercomputing Center, and the other at the University of Toronto.
The major difference between the clusters is that the Singapore cluster offers GPUs and the Toronto cluster is a CPU only affair – so the students will have to show their skills on each style of system.
With that, let’s meet the teams and find out how they think they did in the competition…
Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), South Africa.
Computer Insight UK Team (CUIK), United Kingdom.
University of Heidelberg, Germany
University of Jinan, China
National Chen Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan.
National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), Taiwan
UPC, Spain
USTC, China
Unfortunately, we couldn’t interview each and every team due to schedule conflicts and such. The teams were very busy with this demanding competition and not all of them had time when they could be together at the same time for an interview.
We also had a chance to talk to some of the coaches to get an inside view of how the teams operate and how they approached the competition. Stay tuned for that story plus other great content from the competition!