Student Cluster Competition

The Student Cluster Competition (SCC) was developed in 2007 to immerse undergraduate and high school students in high performance computing. Student teams design and build small clusters, with hardware and software vendor partners, learn designated scientific applications, apply optimization techniques for their chosen architectures, and compete in a non-stop, 48-hour challenge, at the SC conference, to complete a real-world scientific workload, while impressing conference attendees and interview judges with their HPC knowledge.

Competition Overview		Starting a Team
Submission Guidelines		Past Applications

• Friedrich-Alexander University / Technical University of Munich, Germany
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• Illinois Institute of Technology / Maine South High School
• MGHPCC Green Team (UMass Boston / UMass Lowell / Harvard University)
• Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
• Northeastern University
• Peking University, China
• San Diego State University / Southwestern Oklahoma State University
• Tsinghua University, China (ASC17 and ISC17 winner)
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• University of Science and Technology of China (SC16 winner)
• University of Texas at Austin / Texas State University
• University of Utah
• University of Warsaw / Lodz University of Technology / Warsaw University of Technology, Poland
• William Henry Harrison High School

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The SCC was developed prior to efforts to integrate HPC education into undergraduate curricula. Identifying this deficiency early, the original intent was to provide students with early exposure to HPC and motivate undergraduate curriculum development. Despite undergraduate HPC topics slowly becoming mainstream in CS/CE programs, the SCC remains an invaluable tool in HPC education, reaching a multi-disciplinary student population and often provides domain scientists with their first exposure to HPC. The competition also exposes teams to an HPC work environment, requiring teamwork and broad understanding of systems, software, and applications.

Some unique impacts of the SCC to HPC education include providing students the opportunity to work with cutting-edge hardware and software seen in the Top 500 HPC systems. SCC applications and rules are chosen to make teams aware of the interconnections between system architecture and applications, and competition applications are chosen to demonstrate the societal impacts of HPC. For example, simulating how weather and catastrophic events impact urban development, and simulating zombie invasions is similar to understanding the spread of disease. The competition also enables students to be inspired by HPC and use the playful nature of a competition to take risks and drive their own education. By staging the final event during the SC conference, the SCC allows students to see the vibrancy of the HPC community, identify role models, network, establish mentorship opportunities, and learn of career possibilities in HPC.

With the Student Cluster Competition fostering HPC curriculum development in educational institutions, the SCC helps to maintain a computationally-aware work force, to meet the challenges of the future.