Purdue research computing staff members Chuck Schwarz and Lev Gorenstein (standing) work with members of Harrison High School’s student supercomputing team (clockwise, from lower left: Eduardo Butron, Nick Nolte, Jeremy Meyer, Chris Page, Jacob Sharp, Callum Gundlach, and Nick Frooninckx).
For the first time, a team high school of high schoolers will compete in the Student Cluster Competition next week at SC17 in Denver. The team hails from Harrison High School in West Lafayette, Indiana.
The Student Cluster Competition is an HPC multi-disciplinary experience integrated within the HPC community’s biggest gathering, the Supercomputing Conference. The competition is a microcosm of a modern HPC center that teaches and inspires students to pursue careers in the field. It demonstrates the breadth of skills, technologies and science that it takes to build, maintain and utilize a supercomputer. In this real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge, teams of undergraduate and/or high school students assemble a small cluster on the exhibit floor and race to complete a real-world workload across a series of applications and impress HPC industry judges.
The Harrison students have designed and built their own supercomputer, capable of running a variety of real-world scientific software applications, including a mystery application that won’t be announced until the start of the competition. They will be evaluated based on how much science they can accomplish during the 48-hour challenge while staying under a 3,000-watt power limit.
The students have been preparing for the competition since the beginning of 2017. After submitting a proposal, they found out in April that they were one of 16 teams chosen to compete at SC17. Competition will be tough; they’ll be up against teams made up mostly of college students from Europe, Asia and the United States.
Registration is now open for SC17, which takes place Nov. 12-17 in Denver.
