The Mont-Blanc Project will once again sponsor a team at the upcoming ISC 2018 Student Cluster Competition. The sponsored team from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya / Barcelona Tech (UPC) will compete for the fourth time at ISC 2018, which takes place June 24– 28 in Frankfurt, Germany.
Every year, the Student Cluster Competition is an adventure. It is a compelling event, it is exhausting but it brings always a lot of fun. I am always impressed by the technical prowess exhibited by these young teams: the way they are turning our lessons into applied knowledge, through live benchmarking and on the fly troubleshooting is a great process and it triggers a positive loop in all of us. It is an experience that will greatly benefit their career – and their future employers!” explains Filippo Mantovani.
Twelve teams from all over the world will be vying for recognition in the annual ISC-HPCAC SCC. This competition focuses on testing students’ skills through hands-on challenges in High Performance Computing (HPC) disciplines. It works as a catalyst, inspiring novel ideas and highly innovative approaches, while instilling a healthy competitive spirit and camaraderie, resulting in lasting friendships amongst participants.
For this three-day competition on the ISC Exhibition floor, the UPC team will be supported by Mont-Blanc and especially by BSC and Arm, which will provide hardware and software support with a cutting edge Arm-based architecture, but above all the solid and deep know-how accumulated during more than 5 years of experience studying, deploying and running Arm-based platforms for HPC.
This year’s UPC team, with Filippo Mantovani and Daniel Ruiz (BSC) as advisors, is formed by the following UPC students: Arnau Farras, Fabio Banchelli, Guillem Ramirez, Kilian Peiro, Marc Dominquez, Ruben Cano.
In 2017, the UPC team ´ThunderChip´ was named Fan favourite for the second time running, thanks to the support of its numerous fans! This award is given to the most “liked” team voted via an online poll to which ISC visitors participate during the Student Cluster Competition.