Since 2016, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has put together student teams to compete in the Student Cluster Competition at the annual Supercomputing Conference (SC).
This friendly contest brings together teams of undergrad students who then go on to build a high-performance computing cluster under the confines of a specific power budget. Once built, the students then bring this cluster to the conference to compete with others over performance metrics.
While the undergrad students are the stars of the show, they’re helped by various experts in the field of HPC. Many of these team mentors come from NCSA. These various specialists have the real-world experience necessary to help students overcome problems they may not have seen in the classroom before.
What’s more, some of these mentors were once a part of the competition themselves. This gives students a very realistic understanding of how the competition can directly lead to a career in the field of HPC.
EXPLORE STUDENT CLUSTER COMPETITION TEAM