Team NTU Celebrates Third Place Win in Online Component of ISC24 Student Cluster Competition at Hamburg, Germany

Photo from left: Dr Loke Yuan Ren (Advisor), Saeng-nil Natthakan (BCE, Year 2), Chanpaisit Nattapol (CE, Year 2), Bryan Shan Guanrong (BCG, Year 1), Maison Sapol (CS, Year 1), Zhang Danxu (CS, Year 3), Ng Woon Yee (CS, Year 3)

We are excited to announce that Team Supernova has achieved an impressive third place in the online component of the esteemed ISC24 Student Cluster Competition! This outstanding accomplishment highlights our team's expertise, dedication, and hard work in the highly competitive field of high-performance computing (HPC). The competition was held in May 2024 at Hamburg, Germany.

The ISC Student Cluster Competition is a prestigious event that challenges student teams from around the world to design and build powerful cluster computers onsite, code in parallel programming, and optimize applications across various scientific domains. This year, the competition was divided into two parts: an online component with 19 participating teams and an onsite component featuring 8 teams. Securing third place in the online segment is a testament to our team's exceptional skills and perseverance.

Our journey to the podium began three months ago with intense preparation, involving countless hours of coding, hardware optimization, and performance tuning. Team Supernova worked tirelessly to ensure our cluster was ready to tackle the diverse and demanding benchmarks set by the organizers in the three-day event.

Throughout the online competition, we faced and overcame numerous challenges. Our tasks included writing efficient parallel code and optimizing applications from computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics simulations, to climate modelling. Each obstacle was an opportunity to learn and grow, enhancing our technical capabilities and strengthening our team's collaborative spirit.

"Solving complex HPC problems with large-scale high-performance supercomputers was both challenging and uniquely enriching. This competition not only sharpened our technical skills but also fueled our passion for computational science and its capacity to address real-world challenges." said Supernova’s team leader, Zhang Danxu.

"Joining ISC24 SCC was fun. Along the journey we share same values and objectives, leveraging our collective strength and camaraderie, and solved problems together. The most asked question in the team will be: Have you tried? Can I try restarting the server? Sometimes, the inexplicability of an error drove us nuts, but most of the time, having to solve the problem made us even more excited about HPC. Immensely grateful to our sponsor NSCC, and our school NTU for providing such a wonderful opportunity for us to learn and grow" added Ng Woon Yee.

“During chats with other teams, I realised truly how wide the field of HPC is, and the number of small tweaks and optimisation that can be made. The overlap of hardware and software at large scales in HPC really encompasses every aspect of computing, and our diverse team with different backgrounds and interested contributed to our success,” said Bryan Shan Guanrong.

“I think we've done really well as a team. We always communicate and help each other out. Also, the weather in Hamburg is really nice!” added Saeng-nil Natthakan

We are grateful for the unwavering support of our sponsors: National Supercomputing Centre Singapore (NSCC), AMD, Nvidia and Supermicro Inc.. Their generous sponsorship provided us with the resources needed to excel in this competition. We also extend our deepest gratitude to our advisors and industry experts who provided invaluable guidance throughout our journey. Their expertise and mentorship were crucial in helping us navigate the complexities of high-performance computing and achieve our goals.

Our overall performance for the past 10 years has elevated us to third place in the Student Cluster Competition Leadership List, which is based on accumulated performance points from various student cluster competitions. Moreover, we also won second and third place in the APAC HPC-AI competition earlier this year.

For more information about ISC SCC, please visit https://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/events/student-cluster-competition/