Latest News

’25 HPL/HPCG on the Board!

The first task for students in every student cluster competition? Put a stake in the ground with solid LINPACK and HPCG benchmark scores. Our Winter Classic HBCU and HIS (Hispanic Serving Institutions) teams did just that to kick off our fifth annual competition. In an HPC competition, it’s sort of like NASCAR or Formula 1…
Read More

Winter Classic 2025 – Yep, we’re back

It’s been a frantic start to the 2025 Winter Classic Invitational Student Cluster Competition, with a record number of teams and students, plus some new mentors, including a “Mystery Mentor.” (Some background now, ignore this part if you know the deal with the Winter Classic. I’ll give you a signal to start reading again.) The…
Read More

2024 Winter Classic Finale! Awards Gala

We wrapped up the competition with our traditional Gala Awards Ceremony. This was an exciting show, given that only 40 points or so separated first place from fifth place after the Google GROMACS Challenge and heading into the critical judges interview – which was worth 100 points. So there was quite a bit of suspense…
Read More

2024 Winter Classic: Google GROMACS Challenge Results!

The final computational event for the 2024 Winter Classic teams is courtesy of Google, a new mentor partner for 2024. The application? It’s been around for a while (33 years) and is widely used for biophysical molecular dynamics. You know it, you love it, it’s GROMACS. (So why the steak picture? Hey, it’s protein and…
Read More

2024 AWS Mentor Interview

The history of AWS and the Winter Classic has been, in a word, tumultuous. Their initial run in 2022 was a simple task of optimizing a basic OpenFOAM simulation on different processors to achieve the lowest wall clock time to solution. The only requirement was to keep the same airflow coefficient. One team, Prairie View…
Read More

2024 Winter Classic: AWS RELION Reveal!

AWS has been a Winter Classic mentor for three years now and their past challenges have roiled the leaderboard – and this year is no exception. The application? RELION, which stands for “REgularized Likelihood OptomizatioN. It’s used electron electron cryomicroscopy (getting stuff cold and then taking a really close look at it) to reconstruct the…
Read More

2024 Winter Classic: Oak Ridge Mentor Interview

Oak Ridge National Laboratory marks their third year mentoring our student competitors in the Winter Classic student cluster competition. The Oak Ridge competition modules are always, well, different. They don’t ask students to optimize typical HPC applications or benchmarks. Nooo…that would be too easy. At Oak Ridge, they like to throw curve balls. Their first…
Read More

2024 Winter Classic: Oak Ridge Score Reveal!

It’s time to reveal the results from the Oak Ridge competition module, well, it’s actually well past time. My day job and travel schedule have put me way behind, but I am dedicated to getting all this great content out way before the next competition begins. In this show, my special guest commentator is HPC…
Read More

Winter Classic 2024: Meet The Lobos

This is the other team from University of New Mexico, since there are two, right? This team has some significant cluster competition experience with two veterans of previous Winter Classic and SC events. It’s a nice mix of newbies and vets. You’ll see from the video that HPC fever is taking hold, half the team…
Read More

2024 Winter Classic: Meet Team Jackson State

This is the second time we’re seeing a team from Jackson State university. The team features two veterans of the 2023 Winter Classic, which should help, but it’s also a team whose members are involved in a lot of other activities – like bands and things like that – which makes getting together rough. We…
Read More