This year's ASC SCC team in Xining: The contestans in white sweaters (Hannes, Nikita, David, Adrian and Melanie f.l.t.r.) with their student advisor Johannes,
image: J. Dittrich, FAU
2025-05-24
The FAU team for the ASC25 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) at Qinghai University in Xining, China, has returned with a lot of valuable experience and exciting impressions. In a successful online preliminary round with roughly 150 teams, the five students were among the 25 best teams and thus qualified for the finals from May 10 to May 14. In this benchmarking marathon, the students had the task of setting up an HPC cluster using only the hardware provided to them. A big shout-out goes to RRZE for loaning five notebooks to the students as temporary workstations.
This year, FAU’s finalists were able to secure a very respectable midfield position in the ranking of the 25 contestants. Also, they established a very impressive HPL score with the sponsored GPUs as well as a superfast CPU-only LLM, scaling on two sockets simultaneously.
Compared to their first participation last year, the team has improved significantly, and we are already excited to see how they will develop in the future. After the contest, a festive award ceremony and a big closing banquet rewarded them for all the hard work and lack of sleep. Congratulations, they can be very proud of themselves!
In addition to the actual competition, the participants were, of course, also able to gain interesting impressions of Xining and take advantage of the limited free time by engaging in cultural activities. If you would like to get to know the team members better, you can find a charming introduction video of the participants on our NHR@FAU YouTube channel.
image: J. Dittrich, FAU
“This was my second visit at the ASC, last year I participated as a team member, and this time I returned as an advisor. It was great seeing old friends again, but the advisor role was quite different from being a contestant: less focus on the competition itself, more on planning and supporting the team. Also, I wasn’t allowed inside the venue, but had to work in a small room beside the main competition area, where the participants could come over for quick tips and questions. Overall, we were able to achieve a very presentable result this time and have improved noticeably since last year.” Johannes Dittrich, student advisor
