Student Cluster Competition, or SCC, now in its eleventh year, is an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition. Held as part of SC17’s Students@SC, the SCC is designed to introduce the next generation of students to the high performance computing community. Over the years, the competition has drawn teams from around the world.
Here is look back at some previous participants with their feedback on the SCC experience:
Yi-Shan Lu (2nd from left) and his SCC team.
From 2007:
Yi-Shan Lu, Team National Tsing Hua University & PhD student, Computer Science at University of Texas at Austin, Research focus on parallelization of graph algorithms
“My participation in the SCC in 2007 introduced me to the world of high-performance computing (HPC). I decided to dig into HPC further after I knew that it had enabled many applications, but still has many important, unanswered questions. The observation still holds true today.”
Benjamin Jimenez
From 2008:
Benjamin Jimenez, Team Arizona State University (2008, 2009)
CFD Engineer Analyst, Whirlpool Corporation
“Participating in the SCC was an overwhelming trial by fire, but it was also a rare and powerful leadership experience that I repeatedly point to as the catalyst for developing the skills I’ve found most valuable in my engineering career.”
Guido Juckeland, Team Indiana University, United States/Technical University of
Dresden, Germany (mentor)
“I was the mentor of a team and as such learned a lot about teaching and motivating students. I am now heading the Computational Science Group at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (a federal research lab in Germany, similar to the U.S. DoE Labs).
Now, I am working with a team of physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists to help domain scientists in our lab better use the central IT resources for their research. This involves bringing their local IT workflows onto our clusters, setting up data management systems and lots of teaching and consulting.”
Vladimir Coxall
From 2010:
Vladimir Coxall, Team University of Texas at Austin & Professional Services Engineer at Orc Group, Electronic Trading Technology
“I’m really glad that I was able to participate in SCC. It was a fun working together to build a cluster, testing and optimizing performance. We had really good people on our team including advisors and vendors. Everyone pitched in and worked hard.
The special challenges had us focus in different areas – memory, FLOPs, visualization, and helped us build a good all round cluster. I would highly recommend SCC to someone thinking about participating. Seeing how big HPC is and also meeting the experts was cool too, I finally got to put some faces with a lot of the names I had been reading about. SCC was also good preparation – working at Schlumberger I was writing and debugging MPI code.”
Check back here for future profiles of past participants.
