SA students supercompute their way to the top

10 July 2013 News

A team of South African students surprised many at the recent international Student Cluster Challenge in Germany, a supercomputing competition that pits small teams against each other to demonstrate the incredible capabilities of state-of-the-art cluster hardware and software.

The SA team scooped top honours by achieving the highest aggregate points total for all the benchmarks included in the competition and excelled during its interview with the judges. This accomplishment was all the more notable for the fact that this was the first time the country had ever entered the event. The experience is a boon as the country looks to grow a generation of high-performance expertise for national economic development and for large projects such as the Square Kilometre Array.

The Student Cluster Challenge is hosted by the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) and is an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition. In a real-time challenge, teams of six undergraduate and/or highschool students build small clusters of their own design on the ISC exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications.

Nations conducted domestic competitions to select their teams and eight teams were entered into the final. The Centre for High Performance Computing was the organiser of the South African competition. The other countries participating were the USA, China, Germany, UK and Costa Rica.

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