Official Competition Rules, Regulations, Details, and Stuff
Teams
- A team consists of three to six students with up to two official coaches/mentors. Masters and PhD students count as 2 undergraduate team members.
- Additional mentors can work with the teams at any time except during the actual final results runs for the various applications and benchmarks. During that period, no coaches or outside mentors can help students.
- Teams are typically composed of students from the same university or associated with a research institution. However, teams can be from different institutions as long as they compete under a common team name.
Eligible Students
- Any student who has been enrolled in their university from August in the previous competition year is eligible to participate in this competition. In simpler terms, if you are a current student or were a student in August - December of 2025 or later, you would be eligible to compete in the 2026 Winter Classic.
- High school students of any age are also eligible to compete either as an entire team or participating as part of a university team.
- Masters or PhD students are eligible, but for each Masters/PhD student added to a team, the team will be reduced by two (2) undergraduate students. Thus a team with one PhD student can only have an additional four undergraduate students. A team with two Phd students will be limited to two additional undergraduate students. Maximum number of PhD students on a team is three.
Coaches/Mentors
- Each team can have as many informal coaches or mentors as they want, however, they can only have a maximum of two official coaches. Coaches/mentors do not have to be faculty members of the team institution.
- Teams cannot receive any assistance from faculty coaches/mentors during the final competition period of each benchmark/application.
Team Captain
- Each team will needs a team captain who will work with the organizers to coordinate team activities, interviews, etc.
Applications
Cluster Access
- Students will usually have six days access to the mentor cluster during a competition week.
- Mentors typically present training via a video conference on the Monday of the competition week. We will be recording these sessions and will make them available to all students who could not attend the live presentation.
- Students will receive instruction from mentors covering how to access their cluster, the application they selected, how to run it, practice data sets, and profiling help. Mentors may suggest tip on how to optimize performance for the applications but will not give the students specific instructions on this.
Progress Tracking
- These are optional, but we strongly suggest that student teams keep track of what they've done as the competition progresses. This will be the foundation of your presentation to the judges at the end of the competition. Here's what you'll want to track.
- The ‘out of the box’ initial performance of the application on their cluster. This means the results from the first successful application/benchmark run on your cluster.
- Steps your team took to understand the application and optimize it. Results from profiling tests, etc.
- Final performance results on the application – we’re interested in your speedup and how you achieved it. Did you make it go 5x faster than your first full cluster run? 10x? a million times faster? Judges love to hear that stuff.
- If you had problems with the application, note them, and if/how you overcame them.
- Don't leave this to the last minute, it makes the interview session extremely uncomfortable (for you, not us).
Judges Interviews
- Each interview will last for 30-40 minutes. Please prepare a PowerPoint presentation and be ready to present it to the judges.
- Introduce the team to the judges. Try to ensure that each team member participates in the interview – this shouldn’t be a one-person job – the judges want to make sure that everyone worked as a team for the competition.
- Expect to get questions about the applications and benchmarks, judges will ask you questions aimed at understanding how much you know about what you did on your systems. It's a good idea to understand how the application might be used in the real world.
- Expect to get questions about the hardware configuration you used (CPUs, GPUs, memory, etc.)
- They’ll ask what you did to optimize the applications and the results of your work.
- Add any information on analysis and testing you performed to tune/optimize applications.
- Use graphs or tables if appropriate.
- Share your overall impressions of the competition, what you learned, and how this experience might help you in the future.
Hardware/Software Rules & Regulations
- These will be determined by the host mentor and student teams are required to adhere to any ground rules the mentors lay down.
Pre-competition Linux and HPC training
The Linux Problem: Not many university computer science programs require or even have courses on the Linux operating system. Linux is universally used in HPC, AI, and enterprise data centers. If you're going to have a career in computer science, you will need Linux skills.
Solution: We looked and looked then finally found a great introductory Linux course that is free, self-paced, and has hands-on exercises. It's from the Linux Foundation and they really know Linux. The challenge with their intro course is that it is very comprehensive and is way more material than you need to compete in the Winter Classic or work in HPC/AI. I worked with our mentors to curate the course to cut out the stuff that you don't need, which makes the course much shorter while making sure you get what you need. Our Linux training page will guide you through the whole process.
The HPC Problem: There aren't many universities that offer HPC-specific courses. There are a lot of online HPC tutorials, but they typically are specific to a particular application or organization and don't cover the basics.
Solution: After looking for literally months, someone suggested the HPC Summer Boot Camp sessions from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). I took a look and immediately saw huge value. John Urbanic, the presenter, does a fantastic job walking new HPC users through HPC concepts and the reasons behind them. It's engaging, understandable, and starts at a place that's right for computer science students at any level.
There are also hands-on exercises, which are important to make sure you understand the material. This year, you can get access to the PSC Bridges-2 supercomputer and do those very same exercises. To get access to their system, you need to contact me (dan@oldsresearch.com) so I can add you to our Winter Classic account.
We first used this in 2025 and students found it so valuable that they told me it needs to be the very first competition challenge, thus the HPC Crash Course Challenge was born. An exam covering this material will be the very first event in the 2026 Winter Classic, so getting at it earlier will pay off for you and your team.
Event Publicity
- Event Publicity: Publicity is very important to this competition. It makes the competition possible and also will pay dividents for students as individuals and their schools.
- We will be asking for team pictures for the competition website. Please provide them early in the competition.
- We need each team to have access to a high quality webcam with a microphone for group interviews. Please test them beforehand to make sure they have a wide enough field of view and provide good sound quality. If you need a webcam, let us know and we will provide one.
- Teams can expect to be interviewed a couple of times during the competition.
- Publicity interviews will be hosted on the competition website as well as on major HPC publications like HPCwire, InsideHPC, and others.
Tentative Competition Timeline
September – early January: Teams are assembled, mentors signed up, the process of getting students credentials for mentor systems will be started. HPC 101 class(es) will be conducted, just to name a few tasks.
- February 2, 2026: HPC Crash Course module begins with a team briefing. Teams will be faced with an online exam on Saturday February 7.
- Teams will have the next week off from the competition.
- The next event is the HPE LINPACK/HPCG Challenge which begins on February 16 with training and ends on Saturday, February 21.
- Teams get the next week off and then another module will begin with a different mentor organization and application.
- Tentatively, there will may be as many as six competition modules, but more likely there will be five plus the judges interview.
- The final online results and awards ceremony will be either Friday May 1 or Friday April 24.