A team of six South African undergraduate students from two universities scooped first prize at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) held in Frankfurt, Germany, last week.
The ISC is an annual conference on supercomputing, held in Europe since 1986. It stands as the oldest supercomputing conference in the world, bringing over 3 500 researchers and commercial users, and 160 exhibitors under one roof. The conference consists of an International Student Cluster Competition, where students from across the globe battle it out, building small high-performance computing clusters.
The winning team of four University of Cape Town students and two University of the Witwatersrand students competed against 13 global teams in the rigorous and fiercely contested competition, following their success at the national round, where they beat nine other South African teams.
In a real-time challenge, the local students built 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 raced to demonstrate the best performance across a series of benchmarks and applications.
The success follows four days of working on a selection of tests and applications to optimise and run their computer cluster to demonstrate the performance of their chosen design.
“It really is excellent national progress. We have demonstrated consistently that talent and skills abound in our country. These teams come from different universities and provinces – showing that this is now national DNA,” says Dr Happy Sithole, acting director of the CHPC and manager of the National Cyber Infrastructure System.
An initiative of the Department of Higher Education, Science and Technology, the CHPC is one of the three pillars of the National Cyber Infrastructure system.
The winning team was one of the few made up of 50% men and 50% women: Stephan Schröder, Dillon Heald, Jehan Singh, Clara Stassen, Anita de Mello Koch and Kaamilah Desai. They were under the supervision of team advisors and computer engineers David Macleod and Matthew Cawood of the CHPC.
The team took on 102 members of teams from the UK, US, Spain, Switzerland, Estonia and Singapore.
The team took first place, with the highest overall score for all the benchmarks they were given.
Macleod, who is also manager of the CHPC’s Advanced Computer Engineering Lab, says the South African team’s winning formula is to have dedicated students and sponsors. “Our sponsors are excellent and allowed the team to choose equipment without restriction or compromise. In turn, the students put in a lot of time and effort before the competition and arrived at the competition well-prepared.”
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