Research and TeachingStudent Cluster Competition
Join us for the 2024 competition! Preparations for the competition are starting now - we are seeking team members. Deadline: Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023
KickOff meetings: Wednesday, Oct 04 @ 15:00 & Tuesday, Oct 17 @ 18:00.
The Student Cluster Competition is an annual international competition that brings students together to compete in the field of high performance computing.
The competition has been a part of ISC High Performance since 2012. ISC High Performance is one of the world's largest conferences on high performance computing. Since 2018, Heidelberg University has been represented by teams supervised by experts from the University Computing Centre.
At the Student Cluster Competition (SCC), students from all over the world tackle various challenges, such as calculating weather forecasts and climate models, analyzing turbulent flows or solving problems in molecular engineering.
Want to join us?
Are you a student and interested in high performance computing? Become part of the team and gain valuable experience at the next competition, such as:
- working hands-on with the latest hardware technologies,
- gaining or expanding your expertise in the field of software optimization,
- networking with companies in the HPC field to build your future career.
Experience in writing scripts and compiling programs or having attended an HPC lecture may be advantageous but is not a must. Knowledge of Unix/Linus would be an asset.
Since the Corona pandemic, the SCC consists of two parts: a digital competition and an in-person one, to which the team will travel together. There are no costs for you to participate in the contest, you simply need to be willing and able to invest time into preparing for it. While the competition always takes place in May or June, the team applies as early as November and meets regularly to strategize and study together.
Interested? We are looking forward to your email: scc-advisor@listserv.uni-heidelberg.de
2022 Competition
In 2022, in addition to the digital component, the ISC Student Cluster Competition once again included an in-person competition at ISC HPC in Hamburg. There, the “Heidelbears” – as the Heidelberg team calls itself – achieved great success: in the in-person competition, they earned first place in the LINPACK Challenge and in the highest overall score.
The Heidelbears were supported in their win by the URZ Coaches Alexander Haller and Aksel Alpay as well as through the sponsorship of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) e.V. and MEGWARE.
2021 Competition
Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the ISC as well as the Student Cluster Competition took place online. The computing resources for the competition were provided by the National Supercomputing Centers (NSCC) in Singapore and the University of Toronto. Supported by URZ employees Aksel Alpay and Alexander Haller, the Heidelberg team - for the first time under the team name “Heidelbears” - ultimately took home seventh place.
2020 Competition
The 2020 SCC was the first to be held under restrictions imposed by the pandemic. All teams were thus allowed to utilize the uniform HPC infrastructure of the National Supercomputing Center Singapore for the competition. Therefore, good programming work and skillful handling of applications and benchmarks were the most crucial factors in the 2020 competition.
The tasks of the competition were also different: in addition to the usual HPC benchmarks, the students were able to work with computational applications that researchers were using at the time in their search for resources in addressing COVID-19.
2019 Competition
The Heidelberg team entered SCC19 with high expectations, backed by the Gauss Centre and the URZ. There were both new and returning team members, with Aksel Alpay having become an URZ employee and one of the team coaches: "We are counting on the extensive knowledge that the team members have accumulated in the course of their preparation for the competition. We have a group that is inherently ambitious and motivated, and on top of that we have two team members who were on last year's team. We know what to expect.“
In Frankfurt, they competed against fourteen teams from all over the world and ultimately achieved the highest performance among the European participants.
2018 Competition
The year 2018 marked the first time that a team from Heidelberg University participated in the Student Cluster Competition. While the team was not able to build on experience from previous competitions, they made effective use of their prep time: they assigned tasks according to interests and specialties, studied the hardware used in past competitions, and developed strategies for the various challenges.
The team was supported by the University Computing Centre and the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing and started the competition in Frankfurt with an Intel Xeon Skylake system. From among all the European teams, the Heidelberg students ultimately achieved the highest results.
