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SA students take computing skills to Germany

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 12 Dec 2016
Minister of science and technology Naledi Pandor has wished the South African team every success in taking on the competition next year.
Minister of science and technology Naledi Pandor has wished the South African team every success in taking on the competition next year.

A team of six students from the universities of the Western Cape and Stellenbosch will represent SA at the International Student Cluster Competition, to be hosted at the 2017 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), in Germany.

The team was selected out of a group of 10 teams from various universities in SA, who last week battled it out to demonstrate their cluster building and high performance computing skills.

At the National Student Cluster Competition level, students compete to demonstrate the incredible capabilities of high performance cluster hardware and software.

In a real-time challenge, teams of undergraduate students build small, high performance computing clusters on the exhibition floor, using hardware provided by the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) and its industrial partners, and race to demonstrate the best performance across a series of benchmarks and applications.

The local awards ceremony took place on 8 December at the 10th National Conference of the CHPC, held in East London, under the theme: "The last decade of accomplishment, the next decade of opportunity".

The CHPC is a key component of SA's national integrated cyber infrastructure system, implemented by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research on behalf of the Department of Science and Technology.

Dell EMC sponsored the hardware for the national competition, and Eclipse Holdings, Mellanox and Bright Computing sponsored the prizes. For the international competition, Dell EMC will provide the team with equipment, travel, accommodation, meals and training.

The CHPC is not a newcomer to the ISC Student Cluster Competition, having won the top prize in 2013 and in 2014, and taking second place in 2015. This year the centre entered a team of undergraduate students chosen in the 2015 National Student Cluster Competition, and took the overall prize once again, beating 11 other contenders from across the globe.

The International Student Cluster Competition is regarded as the premier international high performance computing student competition, involving teams from prestigious universities around the world, such as Purdue University, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Centre (USA), Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), the University of Science and Technology of China (China), and the University of Hamburg (Germany).

The winning team members are: Mishka Mohamed (University of the Western Cape); Kyle Jordaan (University of the Western Cape); Tyrone de Ruiters (University of the Western Cape); Liam Doult (University of the Western Cape); Phillip Goosen (Stellenbosch University); and Lydia de Lange (Stellenbosch University).

The reserves are Emma Clark (University of the Witwatersrand) and Ella Wilby (Rhodes University).

Congratulating the winners, minister of science and technology Naledi Pandor wished the team every success in taking on the competition next year.

"With South Africa having come first three out of the four times the country has competed in this international competition, there is naturally some pressure on the team, but I am confident that the CHPC will once more provide excellent support to our team, and that we will be proud of the outcome. We are very happy to see our investment in e-infrastructure programmes yielding such exceptional results, and are excited about the promise they hold for the future," said Pandor.

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