South Africa’s supercomputing excellence

3rd Quarter 2016 Editor's Choice News & events

The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) has taken the top prize in the international Student Cluster Competition held at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany. The CHPC is no newcomer in this competition. It won the top prize in 2013 and 2014 and took second prize in 2015. This year the centre entered another team of undergraduate students and took the overall prize, beating 11 other contenders from across the globe.

The international competition features small teams that compete to demonstrate the incredible capabilities of state-of-the-art high performance cluster hardware and software. In a real-time challenge, 12 teams of six undergraduate students build a small cluster of their own design and race to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications.

South Africa is the only country that enters a brand new team each year. This is done to give as many students as possible exposure to the international HPC community.

Participants build small HPC clusters out of hardware provided by the CHPC and its industrial partners. They are given a selection of applications to optimise and run on their cluster to demonstrate their design’s performance. Each team is assigned a budget of R200 000 and a parts list from one of the CHPC’s industry partners and must design a cluster taking into consideration the set of applications which will be used to benchmark the cluster. Once the cluster’s design is finalised the hardware specification is submitted to the CHPC’s partners for manufacturing. The teams are judged on a combination of the performance of the applications and the design of the cluster.

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