RACKlette at ISC25

In a galaxy far away lies the beautiful city called Hamburg. Within that city, there is a mysterious station called Dammtor, which led the six adventurers to the ISC 2025 conference at CCH.

This year the 14th Student Cluster Competition at ISC 25 took place. It is a competition where ambitious young individuals from universities all over the world compete for the most optimised runs of highly parallelised scientific applications.

Our journey began with the well-regarded DB, which delivered us to Hamburg with a tiny delay. Despite a two-hour delay, we arrived happily in Hamburg, where our cluster was already stationed. Our holy cluster named after the greatest cheese Sbrinz was shining in the DB Schenker box. We prepared our 8 node Grace Hopper 200 boosted, Infiniband connected, cluster beforehand in Switzerland so that the assembly in Hamburg would be hassle-free. Without much effort, we positioned Sbrinz into our booth and connected everything necessary, including the 400 Gigabit Infiniband between nodes, an Ethernet connection between nodes and another switch for the table we would work on. After just a few hours, the cluster was up and running.

The challenges that the competition board threw at us included benchmarks and scientific applications. In the following, we will describe those in exactly 10 words.

• code_saturne: the open source computational fluid dynamics and particle simulation application
• openmx: nanoscale material simulation that computes electronic structure and chemical properties
• seissol: an earthquake simulator that can analyze the pressure within continents
• hpl: Measures supercomputer speed solving dense linear equations using LU decomposition
• hpcg: Evaluates supercomputer performance on memory-bound, real-world computational workloads
• lammps: Simulates atomic, molecular, and particle systems for materials science research

This journey was challenging but very rewarding. We, five second-year undergrads and one first-year grad, were preparing throughout the past few months for this event. For most of us, it was the first time attending the largest High-Performance Computing Conference in Europe, ISC 25, and also the first time participating in a cluster competition.

To overcome countless challenges at the competition, we were glad and grateful that we had two great advisors, Professor Torsten Hoefler and Hussein Harake. Many thanks for all their support and encouragement, especially during tough times.

ISC25 was also a fabulous occasion to network. Many tech giants and renowned researchers were attending the conference, including our greatest idol Professor Torsten Hoefler, and Mark Papermaster, the CTO of AMD. When we were not at our booth, we wandered around in the forest of companies. All of us took this chance to broaden our horizons and to expand our network.

This competition was an excellent learning experience that will most definitely accompany us well at our next event: the SC25 student cluster competition in St. Louis.

Will we see you at the next competition? If it sounds intriguing, you can apply to join Team RACKlette at the beginning of each spring semester.