This year’s Student Cluster Competition at SC20 will include two firsts: it will involve the most number of teams (19) in the competition’s 14-year history, and it will for the first time be held completely virtually.
“This year’s Student Cluster Competition will be very different, as it will be 100 percent cloud-based,” explained SC20 SCC Co-Chair Verónica G. Melesse Vergara, from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “Holding the competition in the cloud also allows us to reach a much wider audience by providing access that before would only have been available to in-person participants. Plus, the virtual format reduces cost barriers that have prohibited smaller institutions from applying to the SCC in the past. This will be a great opportunity for the teams to learn a whole set of extra skills in addition to HPC. Having experience in cloud environments will also provide students with an advantage when they enter the workforce.”
VSCC Co-Chair Scott Michael, from Indiana University added, “As the VSCC will be run on Microsoft Azure, the VSCC team is still working on updating the rules to make sure the new ones added apply to the cloud. The students will have to manage their cloud dollars instead of their power budget.”
Here’s a list of participating teams:
Clemson University, USA
ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Boston University, USA
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
North Carolina State University, USA
Northeastern University, USA
Peking University, China
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Shanghai Tech University, China
Southern University of Science and Technology, China
Texas A&M University, USA
Tsinghua University, China
University of California, San Diego, USA
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
University of Texas at Austin, USA
University of Warsaw, Poland
Wake Forest University, USA
Teams, which submitted their cluster proposals in time for an early July deadline, are composed of six students, an advisor and vendor partners. “The students provide their skills and enthusiasm, the advisor provides guidance, the vendor provides resources (e.g., software, expertise, travel funding), and Microsoft Azure provides the cloud credits for the competition,” according to SC20. “Over the summer, students worked with their advisors to craft a proposal that described the team, how the cloud budget would be utilized, and their approach to the competition.”
In a blog today, the conference said the SCC 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 use advanced computing resources.”
