Team FAUSION is back! After a great run last year, the joint student team from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) is returning to the big stage to compete in the Student Cluster Competition at ISC High Performance 2026. Taking place from June 23 to 25 in Hamburg, this year’s six-student team consists of USI students Jonah Holtmann (team captain), Mariia Dubnytska, and Pablo Pérez, alongside FAU students Nils Lederer, Tobias Rühl, and Dennys Huber. The team is once again supervised by PhD students Aditya Ujeniya (NHR@FAU) and Daniel Vega (USI). Just like last time, their task is to design, build, and optimize a small supercomputing cluster, which will be put to the test using standard benchmarks like HPL and HPCG, alongside complex scientific applications tracking fluid dynamics, blood flow, and quantum mechanics.
To prepare for their second consecutive appearance, the team made a return trip to the headquarters of supercomputing specialist MEGWARE in Chemnitz. MEGWARE is sponsoring FAUSION again this year, providing a powerhouse hardware setup that includes three compute nodes loaded with a total of twelve NVIDIA H200 GPUs. The intensive two-day visit, which was led by Jannik Hausladen along with the team, gave the students a chance to work side-by-side with MEGWARE’s engineers, fine-tune their cluster configuration, and run test benchmarks. They also found some time between sessions to relax and explore the city together, making the preparation trip a success.
Returning to the ISC Student Cluster Competition is a fantastic milestone for the team, offering a fresh chance to tackle real-world datacenter challenges and push cutting-edge hardware to its absolute limits. It also highlights the strong, ongoing academic partnership between these German and Swiss universities. With their hardware locked in and lessons learned from the past, FAUSION is ready to take on the challenge in Hamburg once again.
Aditya Ujeniya, NHR@FAU
