The 2023 Winter Classic Invitational Student Cluster Competition is off and running. In this, the third annual installment, 12 Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic Serving Institutions are going head-to-head to see which team can run and performance optimize real-world HPC applications on mentor-provided supercomputers. This competition is quite different from your typical student cluster competition. In this event, students will be running on exactly the same hardware and will have access to the same training – making this a completely level playing field.

Mentor organizations play a big role in this competition. They select the application that the students will be running, they provide both hardware access and software training, and then answer questions throughout their week-long competition module.

All of the 2022 mentor organizations stepped up to the challenge again in 2023, including HPE, NASA Ames, Oak Ridge National Lab, and AWS. Our Platinum Sponsor this year is HPE; other sponsors include AWS, AMD, Cornelis Networks, BioTeam, and Penguin Solutions.

And, yes, the Studio Update Show is back as well, along with the sporty mustard yellow blazers. In the first episode below, we introduce the competition architecture, the mentors, and the sponsors, then reveal the teams in the 2023 field.

It’s exciting and compelling watching, in fact, just over 77% of experts polled suggest that you watch this video at least three times in order to catch every detail and nuance.

Stay tuned for more coverage, next up is the traditional HPC Pop Quiz, much of which was produced by our quiz sponsor Penguin Solutions. After that, we’ll get to meet the teams, meet the mentors, meet the sponsors, and reveal more and more results as we march toward the early April finish. It’s going to be an exciting ride, so jump on the rollercoaster now and avoid the rush.

More information at: https://www.winterclassicinvitational.com/