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 2023 Winter Classic will be hosting twelve teams of students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). Click on the link above to see the full roster for 2023.
Some of these teams are veterans from the 2022 or 2021 Winter Classic, while others are completely new to these competitions and HPC. At the end of the competition, students will have a wealth of hands on experience in building, running, profiling, and optimizing HPC applications on a variety of systems.


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.
Without our sponsors, there wouldn’t be a 2023 Winter Classic Cluster Competition, it’s as simple as that. We’re grateful for their generous support. Sponsors this year will be interacting with the teams, supporting them with meal nights, “cluster competition survival kits’, and looking to recruit students for internships and full-time career positions.

Intersect360 Research
About the Organizers
The 2022 Winter Classic Invitational Cluster Competition is being organized by Intersect360 Research, a leading HPC industry analyst firm. Intersect360 Research is a market intelligence, research, and consulting advisory practice focused on high-performance data center trends, including High Performance Computing (HPC), high performance enterprise, cloud, big data, and hyperscale. Both Addison Snell, CEO and co-founder, and Dan Olds, Chief Research Officer, are deeply committed to this competition and the goal of building the HPC workforce and increase diversity in our industry.
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