RACKlette at SC23

Early on Friday the 10th of November, we all assembled at the airport to embark on a one week trip to Denver, Colorado. After a brief (and slightly hectic) layover in Heathrow Airport, we finally made it aboard the 10 hour flight to the US. The flight was spent completing various activities, some studying and lecture rewatching, some last second competition preparation and for some getting a bit of sleep ahead of what was going to be a very sleep deprived week.

Having arrived at the airport in Denver, we took a very scenic train ride to the city. After successfully checking in at the hotel and having a nice team dinner, we went to bed nervous but excited about what was to come.

The next morning we had a bit of time before the safety briefing, so the team decided to go out and explore our surroundings. Denver is a beautiful city, and there was much to see. We stopped by the Capitol building, local university and strolled around downtown Denver. The tall buildings (and many parking lots) certainly left an impression. In turn we of course also made sure to leave our mark on the city, and made sure to leave behind a few stickers here and there.

The morning after our sightseeing the serious part of the trip began. After a short safety briefing we got to work and began setting up the cluster. Having thankfully not lost it this time, the process was fairly straight forward. Unlike past years, there were stricter requirements for cluster security. This entailed not only setting up the cluster, but also configuring a firewall, and securing access to the cluster. Thanks to the broad background knowledge of our team members, this was no issue and apart from a few mishaps here and there, we were up and running in no time and ready to get going.

On Monday, the benchmarking part of the competition began. We ran HPL, HPCG and MLPerf, and achieved new personal best scores. Despite running on comparatively older hardware, we still managed to fare well, and were one of 4 teams to hit the 100 TFlops mark for HPL.

That evening the convention and thus the competition officially opened, and the problem statements were released. The biggest surprise was the mystery application, which this year wasn't an application at all. The last unknown of the competition turned out to be CTF, meaning we had to scour network logs and also the convention for secrets hidden by the organizers.

For the next 48 hours, the competition was underway, and our hard work and many hours spent preparing truly paid off. We were able to estimate runtimes of the tasks and create a shift plan based off of those, which meant we had solid game plan. This also meant that team members had time to actually explore the convention (which resulted in a lot of cool merch, even if it had to be acquired with questionable opening lines at times). Wanting to make use of every minute of our time, we made sure that something was always running, even deep into the night and into early morning.

In regards to the CTF mystery challenge, we were lucky to have knowledgeable team members, who got the rest up to speed. Not all teams were so fortunate. With some of us opting to sift through massive packet capture files, and others choosing to search the entire convention floor for secrets, we truly gave it our all for the mystery challenge.

Finally two days later, in a hall full of hundreds of people, the long awaited award ceremony commenced. We went into this competition knowing that in terms of raw hardware performance, we stood no chance. Nonetheless, sitting in the audience, waiting for the presenters to finally reach the announcements for the cluster competition was nerve wracking. With heart rates at an all time high, they finally named the winners of the SC23 student cluster competition and WE WON! The feeling was incredible, and so gratifying. Tears were shed, joyful hugs were exchanged and I don't think any of us will ever forget that moment.

Of course, the win wasn't the only meaningful experience we took home with us. The competition also gave us a chance to meet and interact with other teams from all over the world. As the only European team in the competition, it was very refreshing to talk to students our age but with completely different backgrounds. We also were reminded once more how fortunate we are to have not one, but two clusters year round to practice with, which we are very grateful for. Many people, like our supervisors Hussein and Professor Hoefler, helped us along the way, and without them none of this would have been possible.

Overall, SC23 was a transformative experience that left lasting impressions. As we embarked on the trip home, we reminisced about all we had experienced, and look excitedly ahead to the future that this team holds.