Research and Teaching Student Cluster Competition

With a team consisting of both experienced participants and newcomers, the “Heidelbears” entered the online contest of the ISC Student Cluster Competition 2024. The team from Heidelberg University took on current challenges in the field of high-performance computing. This year, they included fine-tuning applications from the fields of fluid dynamics and density functional theory, which is used to simulate the electronic structure in systems with millions of atoms. In the Coding Challenge, part of a weather simulation for graphics cards was ported in order to adapt it to the architecture of modern clusters. The team was supported by the URZ coaches Alexander Haller, Aksel Alpay and Onno Nerjes.

In 2022, in addition to the digital component, the ISC Student Cluster Competition once again included an in-person competition at ISC HPC in Hamburg. There, the “Heidelbears” – as the Heidelberg team calls itself – achieved great success: in the in-person competition, they earned first place in the LINPACK Challenge and in the highest overall score.

The Heidelbears were supported in their win by the URZ Coaches Alexander Haller and Aksel Alpay as well as through the sponsorship of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) e.V. and MEGWARE.

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the ISC as well as the Student Cluster Competition took place online. The computing resources for the competition were provided by the National Supercomputing Centers (NSCC) in Singapore and the University of Toronto. Supported by URZ employees Aksel Alpay and Alexander Haller, the Heidelberg team - for the first time under the team name “Heidelbears” - ultimately took home seventh place.

The 2020 SCC was the first to be held under restrictions imposed by the pandemic. All teams were thus allowed to utilize the uniform HPC infrastructure of the National Supercomputing Center Singapore for the competition. Therefore, good programming work and skillful handling of applications and benchmarks were the most crucial factors in the 2020 competition.

The tasks of the competition were also different: in addition to the usual HPC benchmarks, the students were able to work with computational applications that researchers were using at the time in their search for resources in addressing COVID-19.

The Heidelberg team entered SCC19 with high expectations, backed by the Gauss Centre and the URZ. There were both new and returning team members, with Aksel Alpay having become an URZ employee and one of the team coaches: "We are counting on the extensive knowledge that the team members have accumulated in the course of their preparation for the competition. We have a group that is inherently ambitious and motivated, and on top of that we have two team members who were on last year's team. We know what to expect.“  

In Frankfurt, they competed against fourteen teams from all over the world and ultimately achieved the highest performance among the European participants. 

The year 2018 marked the first time that a team from Heidelberg University participated in the Student Cluster Competition. While the team was not able to build on experience from previous competitions, they made effective use of their prep time: they assigned tasks according to interests and specialties, studied the hardware used in past competitions, and developed strategies for the various challenges. 

The team was supported by the University Computing Centre and the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing and started the competition in Frankfurt with an Intel Xeon Skylake system. From among all the European teams, the Heidelberg students ultimately achieved the highest results.