Student Cluster Competition at SC22

APPLY TO COMPETE IN THE STUDENT CLUSTER COMPETITION AT SC22!

Deadlines 
Student Application Deadline: Wednesday, March 23, 2022
Student Application Notification: Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Student Applicant Invite Confirmation: Wednesday, April 13, 2022
SCC22 Team Application Close: April 30, 2022

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and UC San Diego are putting together a team to compete in the Student Cluster Competition (SCC), held at the annual Supercomputing conference SC22 in Dallas, TX, November 14 – 16. The SCC was developed in 2007 to immerse undergraduate and high school students in high performance computing. The SCC teams consist of a mentor plus 6 students who will design and build a small cluster with support from mentors and hardware and software vendor partners. They will learn designated scientific applications and apply optimization techniques for their chosen architectures. SCC teams compete against teams from around the world, 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. Since 2019, SDSC and UCSD have successfully hosted two teams, and we are planning to stand up a team for SCC22. Team Superscalers competed at SCC20, which was held virtually on the Microsoft Azure Cloud, and finished 4th overall out of 19 international teams. Team ThreadShredders participated in the SCC21 competition, which was again virtual using Microsoft Azure and the Oracle Cloud system. This team placed 1st in the US, 4th overall out of 10 international teams. Both teams had great experiences: so much so that we have had returning members each year!This year, our team captain will be SCC21 alumni Matthew Mikhailov (ECE), who is excited to work with the team again. “Competing in SCC22 will be a great challenge and a lot of fun. I cannot wait to build the deep technical understanding we need to succeed, and to face our tough competition in the event!”

The SCC22 competition is competitive and requires intense preparation and skill development. Our SCC training approach, led by Dr. Mary Thomas (SDSC) and Bryan Chin (CSE), includes over 20 mentors (from SDSC, HPC vendors, UCSD Faculty, external collaborators, UCSD Supercomputing Club), and generous access to the Expanse supercomputer. Students work with mentors throughout the summer and fall to build out and administer a “bare-metal” HPC cluster at SDSC, to learn to install and run HPC applications. For the competition, the cluster is shipped to SCC22 in Dallas, and the team then sets it up for the competition. As part of our training program, all team members will be enrolled in CSE 198, and will be eligible for several Co-Curricular Record (CCR) credits. Team members selected for the “travel” team will travel to the SCC22 competition in Dallas, TX.

If this activity interests you, consider applying to be part of the team. The competition will run from November 14 – 16, for a continual 48 hours, and include early arrival (11/12) to help set up the cluster. All team members are expected to fully participate during the competition. All related travel and expenses will be paid for by SDSC, sponsors, and the SCC22 committee.  As a team member we will assist you to work with professors to help arrange any missed classes, as part of the application we will ask you for a brief 2-4 sentence bio which will be used on the competition website.

See registration site to apply: https://na.eventscloud.com/scc22

Reference Links

SCC22 Student Cluster Competition   
SCC Program and History
SCC22 SDSC/UCSD Student Cluster Competition Team Page   

If you have any questions regarding this program feel free to contact Mary Thomas at mpthomas@ucsd.edu.

We encourage you to apply to become a member of the SCC22 team!