Student Cluster Competition        

The Student Cluster Competition (SCC) was created as an educational tool to immerse undergraduates in HPC. It is a microcosm of professional HPC centers that teaches and inspires students to pursue careers in the field.

The SCC's impact is in new undergraduate curricula and through the experience of the students themselves. The SCC can complement a strong parallel and distributed computing (PDC) curriculum through experiential learning and engagement with the HPC community as a whole, which will prepare graduates for the interdisciplinary nature of work in HPC fields.

SCC papers and resources:

Student cluster competition: a multi-disciplinary undergraduate HPC educational tool. Harrell, S. Nam, H. A., Vergara, V., Keville, K., Kamalic, D. EduHPC-15: Workshop on Education for High-Performance Computing, Austin, Texas. Nov 16th, 2015.

Methods of Creating Student Cluster Competition Teams, by Stephen Harrell, et. al.

SC15 Panel: Mentoring Undergraduates Through Competition

The next generation of HPC talent will face significant challenges to create software ecosystems and optimally use the next generation of HPC systems. The rapid advances in HPC make it difficult for academic institutions to keep pace. The Student Cluster Competition was created to address this issue by immersing students into all aspects of HPC. This panel examined the impact of the Student Cluster Competition on the students and schools that have participated. Representatives from five institutions talked about their experiences with the Student Cluster Competition with regards to their students' career paths, integration with curriculum and academic HPC computing centers.

Presentations:

• Jerry Chou, Tsinghua University
  
  
• Rebecca Hartman-Baker, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  
  
• Doug Smith, University of Colorado, Boulder
  
  
• Xuanhua Shi, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
  
  
• Stephen Lien Harrell, Purdue University