@Supercomputing @SCCompSC FAQ 1: What is the Student Cluster Competition (SCC)? A thread.

Now in its 14th year, the SCC brings teams of 6 undergraduate students from around the world together to build a supercomputing cluster, benchmark it, install 4 #HPC applications, and perform tasks on those applications. There is an 1) overall award and a 2) benchmark award. 1/

There are three benchmark tests: #HPL and #HPCG for number crunching and #IO500 for disk reading/writing. The team with the highest HPL score wins the benchmark award. 2/

For the 4 HPC applications, this year was climate modeling CESM, MD simulation Gromacs, Reproducibility App MemXCT, and the Mystery App MiniVite that was announced at the start of the competition. 3/

The Reproducibility App MemXCT was an accepted paper from #SC19 conference, and the teams need to reproduce the weak and strong scaling results. Some teams will be selected to write a peer-reviewed report for possible publication. 4/

Teams are selected from a number of criteria that includes finding an industry sponsor to provide the hardware for the team. 5/

To level the playing field, there is a power cap on the clusters. 6/

Each team must also demonstrate diversity, broadly defined. 7/

Each team must also do interviews, present a poster, and present a lightning talk. They must clearly communicate what they did. 8/

To do everything above, they have one year to prepare with one primary advisor and also secondary advisors. It’s a lot of preparation. Once the competition starts, however, the advisors cannot help. The undergraduate students are on their own. 9/

Which is why not everyone who wants to compete can. But if you can, you can go toe to toe with the very best in #HPC in the world. It’s like the Olympics of #HPC. 10/

This year is different because we cannot go to the #SC20 Conference with our cluster. This year, the entire competition is in the cloud. @Azure cloud. To level the playing field, instead of a power cap, there is a cloud budget cap. 11/

Also, all of the teams are competing from across 6 countries, 3 continents, and 6 time zones. At the same time. 12/