FAU teams regularly participate at the Student Cluster Competitions, often as the only German team. University students build their own supercomputers for a live face-off to see whose is the fastest. The students not only need to build, install, and maintenance their own cluster system, but most importantly need to run both HPC-related benchmarks and given real-word, scientific workloads within a certain power limit, and the team with the highest-performing system wins.
In this course, the students will prepare for the competition, e.g., writing the submission to be accepted for participation, get hands-on experience on cluster hardware for learning system administration skills, benchmarking, and running applications on HPC systems. It is a 10 ECTS course and runs throughout the summer term 2025. For all students participating in-person in the competition, the course runs until November 2025.