National round 2024

GallERY

OVERVIEW

The CHPC Student Cluster Challenge (SCC) brings student teams together to build and optimize high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. Each team receives a budget and a curated list of components to design and assemble their unique cluster. The specified hardware is delivered to the exhibition hall they are located at.

Once assembled, teams are tasked with optimizing and running a suite of applications on their clusters to showcase their design’s performance. Judging was based on a combination of benchmark results, application performance, and overall cluster design.

This year’s applications were the following:
Benchmarks:

HPCC
HPCG

Applications:

LAMMPS (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator)
MILC (MIMD Lattice Computation)
RegCM (Regional Climate Model)
NWChem (Northwest Computational Chemistry Package)
MathWorks (MATLAB/Simulink)
Secret Application: More details at the competition

Article - CHPC24: Big Thrills at Cluster, Cyber Competitions

The 2024 CHPC (Centre for High Performance Computing, South Africa) National Conference was one for the ages. Taking place this year at Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth), South Africa, it covered all the bases with compelling and interesting content, a great location, and fantastic planning and logistics.

The four day conference was packed with nearly 60 sessions, BOFs, and keynotes led by a very solid group of speakers. You can find video of the sessions here. Take a look, there’s a lot of… read full article

Teams

University of the Western Cape

Thunder Bytes

University of the Witwatersrand

Wits-1

Wits-A

University of South Africa

UNISA-SCT’24

Cape Peninsula University of Technology

DC Spears

University of the Western Cape

HPC Wizards

University of Cape Town

EEElite

Central University of Technology

CUT Team

Sol Plaatje University

Parallel Pioneers

Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University

Algorithm Avengers

RESULTS

First Place:
DC Spears (Cape Peninsula University of Technology)

Second Place:
Wits A (University of Witwatersrand)

Third Place:
HPC Wiards (University of the Western Cape)

Honorable Mentions:
1. Lily de Melo (University of Witwatersrand) for all the work that she continues to do in the HPC community
2. EEElite (University of Cape Town) for being the first all-female team to participate in the competition.