2025 Winter Classic Invitational Student Cluster Competition

"The competition was certainly a lot of work, but it showed me how even the most complex parts of computer science can be broken down and understood by anyone with enough persistence. I got a lot out of the competition, but maybe the most important thing was the confidence that I can tackle any career field that I choose."

"I learned so much valuable information throughout the competition, particularly in the first week from HPE's HPC crash course. Learning HPC topics like SLURM throughout the competition set me up for success in my graduate studies, PhD research, internship at NERSC and my post-graduate school career."

"Before I participated in the competition, I had no real direction in which I wanted my career to go after school. Participating in the competition and learning so many new things I have never been exposed to gave me a new outlook as to what I wanted to do. As I learned more things during the competition I definitely knew HPC was the path I wanted to take."

"The competition was not easy but definitely worth every drop of sweat and the long hours we put in to learn how to build the different benchmarks, how to run them in the different HPC applications systems we worked on, profile them and optimize them.  I went from not knowing anything about HPC to having a career in it and loving my job and it was all thanks to the experience in that spring semester."

"When I joined the competition, I knew absolutely nothing about HPC...My school doesn't have a degree program for HPC, but this competition gave me exactly the insight I needed on my journey to be a research scientist. Now I will be looking into going to grad school for High-Performance Computing or even Quantum Information Science and then hopefully to a lab!"

"What I really enjoyed and what really boosted my confidence in my capabilities was using actual HPC hardware/software in a real-world use case. There was not a lot of fluff to it. It was hard, it was difficult, and I felt like I was banging my head against a wall at times. But it was real-world experience."

"I felt like I was working in an actual job and was able to apply myself in a way I haven't been able to before. Having access to real professionals to help us out was also a real benefit towards giving us that real world experience. So having actual companies and organizations participating in hosting the competitions really is important towards showing students that this is the real deal."