Student Cluster Competition at SC24: Six more weeks till crunch time
Each year, the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) invites student teams from all over the world to compete in several tough challenges, all related to high performance computing and computing center operation. The competition takes place during the largest conference for high performance computing, the Supercomputing Conference – this year in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
As in previous years, a team of brilliant FAU students was accepted for the competition. MEGWARE, the supercomputer company from Chemnitz, generously supports the team with bleeding-edge hardware: two compute nodes equipped with four NVIDIA H100 GPUs each, plus a head node. The students named their team “FAUcet,” in anticipation of a water-cooled system they were going to use in the challenges. Alas, the system is air-cooled now, but a performance behemoth nonetheless.
Participation in the SCC is part of the “Supercomputer Praktikum” at the Department of Computer Science at FAU. NHR@FAU PhD students Dominik Ernst and Jan Laukemann support the team together with bachelor student Jonah Holtmann. Six students (starred on the left) will board the plane to Atlanta, Georgia in six weeks and compete against the other international SCC teams at SC24. The competition consists of a five-month preparation phase and an intense, 48-hour, non-stop benchmarking and tuning marathon on the SC24 show floor. On site, they will be supervised by NHR@FAU PhD student Dane Lacey. This year, the molecular dynamics code NAMD and the numerical weather prediction code ICON are part of the application suite, plus a “mystery benchmark” that will only be revealed on site.
The students have been preparing for the competition for an entire semester and are now looking forward to four days of benchmarking until they drop. A cool trophy and bragging rights await. We bid them godspeed!