NEWSFLASHES

GCS has a long tradition and strong interest in supporting young talents in the Student Cluster Competition, a friendly contest bringing international students together to program a computer cluster and test their high-performance computing (HPC) skills. It is therefore all the more gratifying that a team supported by GCS was invited to participate in both the online and on-site components of the competition at this year's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC23).

In 2022, an international jury selected 17 teams to participate in the competition in 2023; 16 of them for the online competition and 7 teams that will be allowed to demonstrate their skills and knowledge in high-performance computing (HPC) in person during the conference, including the only German team.

The tasks in the competition cover the areas of education and applied learning to accelerate life science, research, and discovery. The teams will be asked to run various real-world applications used by scientists and researchers. In addition, there will be a secret application for those on-site.

The competition is made possible by the supercomputing resources of the University of Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, which is providing resources for the first time this year.

The German cooperative team consists of students from the Universität Hamburg (UHH) and the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg (OVGU). Some team members have already gained experience through their participation from the previous year.

Due to the different orientations of the universities, the team members from both universities have different experiences that complement each other.

“Everyone works towards a common goal, and we support each other when problems arise. For us, it is very instructive to gain realistic practice in the HPC environment.  Unfortunately, the realistic work is not always given in many other university courses,” said Timm Erxleben, team member of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg.

 "Since we now also have private interest in HPC, this competition is an ideal way to actually get to productive clusters and work with them. That would be difficult to do in private.", added Benedict Leuchtenberger from Universität Hamburg.

Organizations, universities and companies also benefit from the student competition: "We are pleased to be able to motivate and support young students on their way into the world of HPC. The developments in HPC are moving quickly and many team members are already interested in the role HPC may play in their future careers", said Dr. Claus-Axel Müller, Managing Director of GCS.

The announcement of the winning teams will take place during a live award ceremony at ISC on May 24, 2023, at 5:15 p.m.