IndySCC 25: Team FAUltier’s recap of SC25
At last year’s Supercomputing 25 conference, which was held in St. Louis, USA, FAU once again successfully participated in person in the Indy Student Cluster Competition (IndySCC 25) with its student team FAUltier. In preparation, the team had to combine multiple resources from the Jetstream2 Cloud Computing System, provided by Indiana University, and orchestrate them to form their own virtual HPC cluster. On this system, they prepared the final competition tasks, which included, for example, the Structural Simulation Toolkit and the Gordon Bell Award–winning Exascale Climate Emulator presented at SC24. These tasks were complemented by a 24-hour “hero run” before the on-site competition, which involved running the HPL benchmark across a larger set of CPU nodes, and a mystery task, which was revealed only within the 46-hour competition window and turned out to be ACTS (A common Tracking Software).
The team achieved a top-10 finish out of a total of 30 teams from six different continents! During the competition week, the team not only focused on technical challenges but also actively exchanged experiences with other international teams, building valuable connections. Outside of the official competition hours, all participants took advantage of the opportunity to take part in a variety of tutorials and programming workshops.
Team FAUltier would also like to express its gratitude to its sponsors and supporters: MEGWARE for providing team clothing, which strengthened the team identity during the event, the RRZE for supplying loan laptops used for the final preparation and competition phases, and the Department of Computer Science at FAU and the NHR@FAU for travel subsidies. Finally, it would like to thank Jonah Holtmann, who was part of the advisory team during the preparation phase. The team is already excited for upcoming competitions, such as the ASC 2026 Student Supercomputer Challenge in China, where they plan to participate in a similar team composition and further improve their technical skills, teamwork, and overall experience in high-performance computing.