Student Cluster Competition at SC23

APPLY TO COMPETE IN THE STUDENT CLUSTER COMPETITION AT SC23!

Deadlines
Student Application Deadline: Friday, April 21, 2023
Student Application Notification: Friday, April 28, 2023
Student Applicant Invite Confirmation: Friday, May 5, 2023
SC23 Team Application Close: May 15, 2023

APPLY: https://na.eventscloud.com/SC23

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 SC23 in Denver, Colorado November 13-15. 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.

SDSC and UCSD are putting together our fourth team to compete in the 2023 Student Cluster Competition (SCC23) to be held at the annual Supercomputing conference Supercomputing 23 (SC23)  in Denver, CO, November 13 – 15.  SDSC and UCSD have now successfully hosted three teams:

• Team Superscalers competed at SCC20, which was held virtually on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Our team 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, our team placed 1st in the US, and 4th overall out of 10 international teams.
• At SCC22, Team 2MuchCache brought a cluster system provided by Supermicro, consisting of AMD Epyc CPUs and Instinct GPUs, with additional hardware provided by Liquid, and Graid.
• Team 2MuchCache also won the 2022 Student Cluster Competition HPL Benchmark Contest, becoming the first U.S. team to win this award since 2010. The team also placed third overall among 13 teams – six from the U.S. and seven from around the world.

All of our teams have had great experiences: so much so that we have had returning members each year! This year, our team captain will be SCC22 alumni Khai Vu (ECE), who is excited to work with the team again.

“Competing in SCC23 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 SCC23 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 SCC23 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 SCC23 competition in Denver, CO. In addition, we will seek out funding to bring alternates and to sponsor Supercomputing Student Volunteers.

If this activity interests you, consider applying to be part of the team. The competition will run from November 13-15, for a continual 48 hours, and includes early arrival (11/11) 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 SCC23 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/SC23

Reference Links

SCC23 Student Cluster Competition
SCC Program and History
SDSC/UCSD Student Cluster Competition Team Page  

If you have any questions regarding this program feel free to contact Mary Thomas at mpthomas at ucsd.edu or Bryan Chin at b5chin at gcloud.ucsd.edu

We encourage you to apply to become a member of the SCC23 team!