OVERVIEW
The CHPC Student Cluster Challenge (SCC) brings together student teams from across the country to design, build, and fine-tune their own high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. Each team is given a fixed budget and a predefined list of hardware components, which are delivered directly to the competition venue.
After assembling their systems on-site, teams must optimize and run a selection of scientific and computational applications to demonstrate the performance of their cluster. Judging focuses on several criteria, including benchmark results, application efficiency, and the overall effectiveness of the cluster design.
The applications for the 2025 competition include:
Synthetic Benchmarks:
- HPC Challenge (HPCC)
- High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG)
Application Benchmarks:
- AmberMD (Assisted Model Building with Energy Refinement – Molecular Dynamics)
- ASCOT5 (HPC code for Fusion Plasma Physics and Engineering)
- DFTB+ (Density Functional Tight Binding – Quantum Mechanical Simulation)
- HemeLB (lattice-Boltzmann solver for blood flow simulation)
- MathWorks (MATLAB / Simulink)
- Secret Application: Further information at the competition
