Microsoft Azure and the 2022 Student Cluster Competition

In 2007, the first Student Cluster Competition (SCC) was held at the annual ACM SC conference in Reno, NV. The competition challenged six teams of undergraduate students to work with vendor partners in building a small cluster that could run within a 26A power limit and learn how to run/optimize various real world HPC applications and benchmarks. Over the years, this competition has become a staple at the SC conference and has continued to add more challenges for teams. These have come in the form of mystery applications, reproducibility challenges, and power outages.

In 2017, Microsoft collaborated with the SCC committee to introduce a cloud component to the competition. In addition to the physical cluster they would bring to the conference, teams were given access to an Azure CycleCloud environment. Instead of the usual power cap they had for their physical systems, they were limited by a budget that was kept secret until the competition began.

This year Microsoft continues to support the competition for the sixth year in a row. Teams will once again have access to Azure using CycleCloud and will be able to supplement their physical clusters with HPC offerings from Azure, including but not limited to HC, HBv3, and NDv4 VM types. We invite anyone coming to the conference to stop by the Microsoft or Student Cluster Competition booths to see the progress of the teams starting at the Opening Gala event on Monday night. In addition, the public can view team progress by visiting the SCC competition dashboard at http://dashboard.studenclustercompetition.us. You can also visit the official Student Cluster Competition site to learn more about what challenges are in store for teams this year.

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