Students interested in demonstrating their high-performance computing skills on a global stage are invited to team up and sign up to compete in the tenth annual Student Cluster Competition at the SC16 Conference to be held Nov. 13-18, 2016, in Salt Lake City. SC16 is the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis.
The Student Cluster Competition is a high energy event featuring young supercomputing talent from around the world competing to build and operate powerful cluster computers. Applications are now being accepted and the deadline for team submissions is Friday, April 15, 2016.
Created as an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition, the Student Cluster Competition aims to introduce the next generation of students to the high-performance computing community. Over the last couple of years, the competition has drawn teams from around the world, including Australia, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Russia, Taiwan and the United States.
New this year is the SCC Reproducibility Initiative, in which students will be challenged to reproduce a paper rather than run prescribed datasets. Students will be responsible for replicating results from an award-winning paper that was presented at SC15. This is the first time that students have been challenged to reproduce a paper rather than run prescribed data sets. Although they are doing similar tasks from previous competitions, they are seeing it from an entirely new perspective, as a component to the scientific process.
We want students to understand, early in their careers, the important role reproducibility plays in research,” said SCC Chair Stephen Harrell. “We are excited to bring this new challenge to the students of the SCC.”
This year the SCC committee has updated and changed the submission guidelines and has implemented a new review system. In addition all teams will now get comments back from the review process. Read about the new scoring rubric.
In this video from SC15, Rich Brueckner from insideHPC talks to contestants in the Student Cluster Competition.
How the Challenge Works
In this real-time, non-stop, 48-hour competition, teams of undergraduate and/or high school students assemble small cluster computers on the SC15 exhibit floor and race to complete a real-world workload across a series of applications and impress HPC industry judges. Prior to the competition, teams work with their advisor and vendor partners to design and build a cutting-edge cluster from commercially available components that does not exceed a 3120-watt power limit (26-amp at 120-volt), and work with application experts to tune and run the competition codes.
Held as part of SC16 Student Programs, the Student Cluster Competition is designed to introduce the next generation of students to the high-performance computing community. Over the years, the competition has drawn teams from around the world, and continues to be exciting, educational, and a truly rewarding experience for students, advisors, vendor partners, and SC participants.
