Link to Campo:

Summary

What? Lab exercise to prepare six bachelor students (master students should read the last paragraph of the details section to find out whether they are qualified) to participate in the student cluster competition at SC’24 in Atlanta in November 2024.

When and where? A first meeting for students interested in the lab exercise will take place in the first week of the semester.

Details

Each year, our university attempts to send a team of six bachelor students to the student cluster competition that takes place at the Supercomputing Conference (SC). This team is supervised together by Inf 3 and NHR: https://hpc.fau.de/teaching/student-cluster-competition/ . With its ten-thousand visitor count, SC is the largest scientific conference and exhibition about high-performance computing in the world. This year, SC will take place from November 17 to 22 in Atlanta, USA.

https://sc24.supercomputing.org/students/student-cluster-competition/

Travel cost to the US and accommodation will be covered by the conference, FAU, and our sponsors.

In the student cluster competition, twelve teams from all over the world compete to get the highest performance out of their self-assembled mini-clusters for a set of applications under a 3000 W power constraint.

The „Supercomputing Praktikum“ was created to prepare six students to take part in this competition and allow them to collect credits (i.e., 10 ETCS) along the way. In the lab exercise, students will learn how to set up and administer a small cluster, how to run the LINPACK and HPCG benchmarks, how to analyze applications, and how to optimize them for energy efficiency. Except for basic LINUX skills, motivation, and the commitment to travel to the US, there are no formal prerequisites for the lab. By default, the lab exercise will be held in German. However, if an international student becomes part of the team, we’ll switch to English.

The Supercomputing Praktikum is jointly organized with the Erlangen National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU). Students will get access to the NHR@FAU resources and can also get training and advice from NHR@FAU’s HPC experts.

Note: According to the rules only bachelor students are eligible to take part in the student cluster competition. Note however, that students already enrolled in a master course are eligible to participate if they have not yet received their bachelor diploma. So, if you are close to finishing your bachelor’s curriculum, be sure to ask for a „Schein“ in your last examinations and don’t hand it in until after the competition.

Impressions of previous years

You can find some impressions about last year’s competition here. FAU’s team was able to win in one of three categories Additional there is a video below from 2018: