Pretoria - Team South Africa scooped overall top honours at the International Student Cluster Challenge held in Leipzig, Germany, recently.
The Team achieved the highest aggregate points for all the benchmarks included in the competition (Linpack and the chosen applications) and acing the interview with the judges.
South Africa’s resounding success was unexpected, seeing as the country was a first time entrant.
The Student Cluster Challenge is hosted by the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) and is an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly, yet spirited competition.
The 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, teams of six undergraduate and/or high school students build small clusters of their own design on the ISC exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications.
The students have a unique opportunity to learn, experience and demonstrate how high-performance computing influences our world and day-to-day learning.
Held in collaboration with the High Performance Computing Advisory Council and ISC, the Student Cluster Challenge is designed to introduce the next generation of students to the high performance computing world and community.
Nations conducted domestic competitions to select their teams and eight teams were entered into the final.
In Leipzig, the following countries were represented, USA: 2 teams, China: 2 teams, Germany: 1 team, UK: 1 team, Costa Rica: 1 team and South Africa: 1 team.
The experience will assist South Africa grow a generation of high performance expertise for national economic development and for large projects such as the Square Kilometre Array.
The national team is expected to arrive in South Africa on Saturday. – SAnews.gov.za
