Swiss-German team “FAUSION” prepares for the Student Cluster Competition at the ISC 2025
The ISC 2025 in Hamburg is one of the best places in the world to be to for learning about high-performance computing and its applications. Its goal is to spread knowledge, foster innovation, and promote international teamwork in this area through its rich program of keynotes, conference talks, workshops, tutorials, and a Student Cluster Competition (SCC). Inviting student teams from all over the world, the SCC gives them the opportunity to compete in a series of difficult challenges centered on high-performance computing and data center operations. Every year, students who compete in this event not only get to show off their skills in a fun and lively setting, but they also make friends for life, network professionally, and gain a lot of technical knowledge.[/column]
This year’s ISC SCC team is called FAUSION. It consists of six students from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) and the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). FAU master student Jonah Holtmann and two doctoral students, Aditya Ujeniya (NHR@FAU) and Daniel Vega (USI), supervise the ISC SCC team.
MEGWARE generously supports the team with cutting-edge hardware: three compute nodes equipped with four NVIDIA H200 GPUs each. The student team recently had the incredible opportunity to visit MEGWARE in Chemnitz for an insightful two-day field trip. The students were warmly welcomed by the cluster experts with a tour of their facilities, including benchmark clusters, development centers, and a chance to meet brilliant minds from different departments. Day two was packed with deep dives into energy-efficient architectures, exploring solutions to stay within power budgets while maximizing performance.
These insights are crucial as the students gear up for upcoming competitions.
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. In June, they will board the train to Hamburg—a cool trophy and bragging rights await. We bid them Godspeed!
Get to know the FAUSION team
Johannes is currently in the second semester of his Computer Science master at FAU. He likes tinkering with unconventional hard- and software environments to potentially speed up program runtime. Outside the digital world, Johannes is a voluntary firefighter and engages in lots of local communities, where he helps to organize events.
Nikita is a third-semester student at the FAU. Aside from computer science, he enjoys sightseeing, going to the gym, and cycling. Always looking to learn new things, he is interested in all fields of CS, especially functional and low-level systems programming.
Christoph is currently in his seventh semester of FAU’s Computational Engineering bachelor program. His specialization is in signal processing and information theory, but he has also taken numerous HPC-centered elective courses on numerical simulation. When not studying, he enjoys planning pen and paper games, playing the piano, rock climbing, and 3D modeling and printing.
Alberto, a double-degree Master student for EUMaster4HPC, is in his first year at USI, studying computational science. He is interested in many facets of HPC, such as parallelization, HPC architecture, data structures, and coding in general. His hobbies are coding, watching movies, and playing instruments like piano/guitar.
Georg is currently in his third semester of a double-degree Master’s program in Computational Engineering and Computational Science, with a focus on high-performance computing, heterogeneous computer architectures, and numerical simulations. In his free time, he enjoys playing the guitar, engaging in sports, hiking, and fixing things.
Tornike is currently in the second year of a double-degree Master’s program at LUT (Finland) and USI, focusing on high-performance computing, AI-driven solutions, and physical simulations. He has contributed to SimMS, a CUDA-powered kernel used in chemical discovery, drawing on his electromagnetics and computational optics background.