Team Information
Location: Santa Cruz, California
Established: 1965
Enrollment: 19,457
Mascots: Sammy the Slug
This is the third Winter Classic competition for UC Santa Cruz. In the inaugural 2021 event, they took home the Bronze Medal, then took a year off to participate in the 2022 ISC Student Cluster Competition. They returned to the Winter Classic 2023 and nailed second place – on 4.29 points (out of a total maximum of 700) behind the winning team. e competitor in the Winter Classic, having participated in the inaugural 2021 event and took home the Bronze Medal. The school is building a strong cluster competition program, to say the least.
Their 2024 Winter Classic team features two seniors, two juniors, and a freshman with majors ranging from Computer Engineers, Applied Mathematics/Bioscience, and, of course, good old Computer Science. While this is an entirely new team this year, they’ve proven they can compete in the top echelon, maybe this is their year to add a Winter Classic trophy to the case?
2024 Team Roster:
Andrew Barth-Yi: "My name is Andrew, I'm on the not-so-slow-slugs team at UCSC. I am a fourth year computer engineering student with a big interest in FPGAs, computer architecture, and just about anything low level. My hobbies include: drumming, powerlifting, snowboarding, and audio engineering. Powerlifting specifically has been an integral part of my interest in HPC because of some similarities between the two activities. In powerlifting, you are optimizing a biomechanical problem and tweaking form to lift the most weight your body can handle, and in HPC you optimize the software problem to extract the most flops out of the hardware. Eventually, I want to compete at the national level in powerlifting, and work with bleeding-edge hardware in the data-center (maybe even integrating FPGAs into HPC applications!). The skill that I rely on the most in my academic career and this event is my ability to learn anything and everything - extremely fast. Ever since I transferred to UCSC, my foundational knowledge from computer science classes in community college has allowed me to pickup any language, framework, or library faster than my classmates and I use it to help them out anytime I can. This ability was coerced out of me by some amazing professors and I have to give them a lot of credit for my current academic success."
Lino Le Van
Gary Mejia Martinez: "I am Gary Mejia Martinez, a fourth year computer engineering major at UCSC. My interests are in VLSI, FPGAs, EDA, algorithm analysis and complexity theory. Currently I am working on several projects such as a water tap sensor for my capstone project and a place and route back-end for an HDL compiler framework. I am currently exploring what HPC is just for fun with friends from graduate computer architecture. Outside of school I like to cook expensive dishes and play videos games."
Dmitry Pleshkov: "Hello, I'm Dmitry and I'm a computer science student at UC Santa Cruz. I'm a second year student, but I'm already taking classes at the junior and senior level. My interests include cybersecurity, networking, and high performance computing. I'm knowledgeable in C/C++, JavaScript, Java and Python but my favorite language is Rust; I like optimizing and securing things. This is my first HPC competition, and I did not expect it to be as exciting as it already has been -- seeing your scripts run faster and faster is incredibly satisfying."
Kenneth Price: "I'm Kenneth, a senior at University of California, Santa Cruz studying computer engineering! I love to fill my time with tinkering and learning, especially with electronics and computer hardware. My dream is to be part of the design process for a chip that improves people's lives.:
Ananthajit Srikanth: "My name's Ananthajit (I also go by Ant!). I'm a third year undergraduate studying Applied Mathematics and Bioinformatics. I'm interested in systems and compiler design, which I hope to pursue after my undergraduate studies. In my free time, I like to read, watch math videos, write code and play video games!"
Faculty Advisor/Coach
- Dr. Scott Beamer
2023 Winter Classic
2023 Team Roster:
- Aidan Au-Yeung
- Alexander Beloiu
- JiaCheng Liu
- Kyle Little
- Mark Forbush
- Victor Chen
Faculty Advisors/Coaches
- Dr. Nilesh Negi
- Dr. Scott Beamer
"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."
2021 Winter Classic
2021 Team Roster:
- Matthew Boisvert
- Jackie Garcia
- Chris Liu
- Connor Masterson
- Daniel Mcgreer
Faculty Advisors/Coaches
- Dr. Heiner Litz
- Dr. Scott Beamer