Six tech-savvy students from Texas A&M are participating in an international competition for high performance computing until Thursday.
The Student Cluster Competition brings students from around the globe together to compete in a non-stop 48-challenge to learn scientific applications and apply optimization techniques for their chosen architectures through a real-world scientific workload. The competition is taking place in Dallas and has competitors from China, Indonesia, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, Poland and Germany.
Students will design and build a cluster at the supercomputing conference said John Cazes, deputy director of High Performance Computing at Texas Advanced Computing Center.
“The students are on their own to run benchmarks and scientific workflows,” Cazes said. “They are judged on how much of the scientific workflow they complete, how many results they can turn in, and the performance of their benchmarks.”
Participant Sheldon Wei said he is looking forward to the opportunity to utilize high-tech equipment in the competition.
“What we will be doing at the competition is that we will try to make applications run as fast as possible on computers,” Wei said. “There will be a lot of cutting-edge technology and we will be able to see all of it. That’s pretty exciting for me.”
The participants will be led by their adviser and computational scientist Jian Tao. While advisers are responsible for guiding their students during the two days prior to the actual competition, students have to work by themselves during the 48-hour challenge.
“We’ve been to other cluster competitions and we have had a lot more training time. We have a lot more knowledge from previous experiences,” participant Michael Lau said. “We’re not nervous, we are just really excited.”