Countdown to the 2025 Winter Classic
Our Goals
Attract young new talent from diverse communities to HPC and get them hands on experience with real HPC systems and applications.
Give these highly motivated self-starters skills that will qualify them for intern and full-time positions in the industry.
Showcase their expertise, personalities, and institutions in the Winter Classic Student Cluster Competition.
The 2025 Winter Classic is featuring a competition record 15 teams of students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). The competition slimmed down to 10 teams as academic loads, jobs, and the time commitment of the competition took a toll.
Most of the 2025 teams have competed in previous Winter Classics, we want to extend a special welcome to first time competitor, University of California, Riverside.
You may notice that four universities have entered two teams in the 2025 competition, this is a big increase from the two or three schools who have done this in the past. This is a sign that we're achieving our goal of raising interest in HPC (and AI too). So yay!
The event will start on January 13th when the student teams get access to the HPE supercomputers hosting their first competition module, the HPL and HPCG benchmarks. Their goal is to learn to run the benchmarks and then optimize it to maximize performance.
At the end of the competition, students will have learned how to build, run, profile, and optimize six different HPC/AI workloads on six different supercomputers provided by the mentor organizations (listed below.).
Click on a logo to meet a particular team. For extra credit, meet them all!
Mentors fulfill a vital role in the Winter Classic Cluster Competition. Teams run their HPC benchmarks and applications on clusters in the mentor data centers, giving the students the rare chance to use a real-life HPC system. Mentors select the application that teams will run in the mentor data center. Mentors teach the team about the application, how to build and run it, how to profile it, and give the teams tips and tricks on application optimization.
Click on a logo above and take a look at what they've done for the students in this competition.
Without our sponsors, there wouldn’t be a 2025 Winter Classic Cluster Competition, it’s as simple as that. We’re grateful for their generous support. Sponsors also actively recruit student participants for internship and full-time career positions.
Give their logos a click to see what they're up to in HPC...
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Olds Research
About the Organizers
Dan Olds started following student cluster competitions in 2010 and rapidly became a big fan. Over the years, he has covered every major competition, publishing hundreds of articles and videos in The Register, InsideHPC, and HPCwire.
Olds founded the Winter Classic Invitational Student Cluster Competition in 2020, with the first test event taking place in early 2021. In 2022, he changed the formula for student cluster competitions by bringing in HPC/AI expert organizations to train the student teams as well as provide them with cluster access. The result is a competition that gives students the real-world HPC/AI experience they need to land great jobs in our industry.
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