UC San Diego Students Team Up for Annual Supercomputing Contest

Published August 29, 2022

By Kimberly Mann Bruch, SDSC External Relations

The 2022 Supercomputing Conference (SC) organizers recently announced that a team of students from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) Department at UC San Diego will be among the 10 groups selected to participate in the 2022 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) in mid-November. The six 2022 team members are Edward Burns, Stefanie Dao, Longtian Bay, Yuchen Jing, Davit Margarian and Matthew Mikhailov.

This year's SDSC/CSE SCC team, named 2MuchCache, will be mentored by Mary Thomas (SDSC) and Bryan Chin (CSE) with assistance from Andreas Goetz, Mahidhar Tatineni and Bob Sinkovits.

"We are really excited about leading these UC San Diego CSE undergraduate students," said Bob Sinkovits, who serves as the director of Education and Training at SDSC. “Although the competition will be extremely tough, I think our team has the determination and technical ability to win the gold this year.”

According to Mary Thomas, SDSC's HPC training lead, this year’s team is excited to be able to compete in person at SCC22 in Dallas. “This will provide our students with a very rich and in-depth experience that will introduce them to the fascinating and wonderful world of HPC,” she said.

Credit: ThreadShredders

SCC was developed in 2017 to immerse undergraduate and high school students in high performance computing (HPC). SCC teams consist of worldwide participants, in a non-stop, 48-hour challenge to complete a real-world scientific workload, while keeping the cluster up and running, and demonstrating to the judges their HPC skills and knowledge. Each SCC team consists of six students who design and build a small cluster with support from mentors, as well as hardware and software industry partners. The teams learn designated scientific applications and apply optimization techniques for their chosen architectures.

“SDSC and UC San Diego have sent teams to SCC20 and SCC21—the team members had a great experience each time, even though the competitions were virtual,” explained Thomas. “This experience has been shown to have lasting impacts on our students: 30 percent of last year's team has found jobs in HPC.”