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For the first time in any student cluster competition, student teams were challenged to work a real-life problem on a quantum simulator, quantum emulator, AND a real quantum system. Long time Winter Classic mentor Oak Ridge National Lab went above and beyond on this one, training the students up on quantum concepts and how to…

Our student teams get a lot of real-world HPC experience in the course of the three-month Winter Classic cluster competition. They get to run on five different supercomputers, are trained by HPC experts, and run/optimize real HPC/AI workloads. This is all great and it’s attracting new talent to our industry. But are they really learning…

With the HPL/HPCG challenge in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to meet the HPE mentors who made it happen. Most of the mentor crew have taken on the task in past years, but have a new coordinator this year, Elizabeth Reeve, who did a great job. The only place where she didn’t excel was in…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…