Team Information
Location: Santa Cruz, California
Established: 1965
Enrollment: 19,457
Mascots: Sammy the Slug
UC Santa Cruz is a second time competitor in the Winter Classic, having participated in the inaugural 2021 event and took home the Bronze Medal. They also participated in the 2022 ISC Student Cluster Competition. Located in the tech-rich Silicon Valley, the school offers a wide and deep computer science curriculum, and offers undergrad, masters, and PhD degrees in computer science and engineering and also electrical and computer engineering – that’s some high powered stuff there.
The team this year features four freshman students, all majoring in computer science. They’re joined by two junior Applied Mathematics majors. We’re not sure if the 2023 Winter Classic team has any holdovers from their 2022 ISC team, that experience could definitely help the team.
"Aidan Au-Yeung is a Freshman at UC Santa Cruz currently majoring in computer science. He likes working out, gaming, learning about computer science and coding. He doesn't really know a lot about supercomputers but has been actively learning with UC Santa Cruz’s HPC club and is really looking forward to learning more with this competition."
"Alexander Beloiu is a Freshman at UC Santa Cruz, majoring in Computer Science. His hobbies are hiking, gaming, programming, and sleeping. He has experience with the Linux command line, and likes to program in Python and C, but is new to High-Performance Computing. He is interested in learning new skills and using these skills competitively."
"Victor Chen is a Freshman at UC Santa Cruz and is majoring in Computer Science. He likes playing games and programming in his spare time. He has experience coding in JavaScript, C++, and Python, but is new to High-Performance Computing. He is ready to face any challenge that awaits him."
"Mark Forbush transferred to UC Santa Cruz in 2022 as a Junior and is currently majoring in Applied Mathematics and Engineering and minoring in Bio-Informatics. He studies biological systems modeling, using tools such as distributed systems to aid in a deeper understanding of biological life and computer science. He has experience with parallel programming concepts and is well-versed in MPI and OpenMP programming, He intends to use his experience with High-Performance Computing during a post-graduate degree to build larger and more detailed biological simulations."
"Kyle Little joined UC Santa Cruz in 2020 and is currently a Senior at UC Santa Cruz majoring in Computer Science. He is interested in compilers, GPU memory models, quantum information, and systems research. Currently, he is working with his advisor Dr. Tyler Sorensen on testing the security guarantees of the new language WGSL (WebGPU Shading Language). He has also worked on generative adversarial networks and on finding ways to generalize the procedures used for neural networks."
"JiaCheng Liu joined UC Santa Cruz in 2022, and is majoring in Computer Science. Although he is a freshman at UCSC, and recently started learning about High-Performance Computing, he is interested in solving problems at the Winter Classic Invitational and facing challenges with the team. In addition to the UCSC HPC club, he is also active in the Google Developer Student Club (GDSC) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) club, participating in their problem solving workshops and Leetcoding sessions."
"Nilesh Negi is the manager and co-mentor of this team. He joined UC Santa Cruz in 2021 and is currently a second-year Master's student in Computer Science and Engineering. His research interests include designing and optimizing distributed systems for large-scale Graphs and Deep Learning workloads. In the summer of 2022, he interned with NVIDIA Mellanox and worked on optimizing the Unified Collective Communication (UCC) library for multi-node, multi-GPU Deep Learning workloads. Before joining UC Santa Cruz, he worked for six years as a Senior Systems Engineer in the High-Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence team at Hewlett Packard Enterprise."
"Our faculty advisor and mentor, Prof. Scott Beamer is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. His research interests include high-performance graph processing, computer architecture, and open-source hardware design. He received the Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award from SPEC, as well as best paper awards from the International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) and the International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC).
He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and was formerly a postdoctoral scholar at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Originally trained as a computer architect (an early contributor to RISC-V), he enjoys applying that background to High-Performance Computing. He got his start at SC 2011 when he created a new BFS algorithm for Graph500 that allowed a single server to outperform clusters of hundreds of servers, including a Cray XMT. Within a year at the next competition (SC 2012), at least 27 of the top 31 finishers in Graph500 were using his algorithm.
After working on accelerating applications for years, he is happy to train the next generation and was pleased to
coac the UCSC team that placed third in the 2021 Winter Classic Cluster competition."