Vryheid brainiac competes to build world’s best budget supercomputer

ASHLEY NAUDE is studying Electronic Engineering at Stellenbosh University, and every year a division of the CSIR called the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) sends a team of six undergraduate students to the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) held in Germany.

The selection process starts in the previous year with a Winter Week. Students apply to attend and based on marks and diversity of the team you either get in or not.

There were 22 teams of four at Ashley’s Winter Week held at the University of Johannesburg in June this year. In September Ashley heard that her team had been selected as one of 10 teams to compete in the national round which was held at the CSIR ICC in Pretoria last week.

The task was to design a cluster (which is two or more computers working together to make a supercomputer) within a budget of R200,000. Says Ashley, “We then get sent the hardware, set it up along with some software and then have to run some benchmark tests.”

There are judges from all across the world that come and interview the teams. The winning team is decided based on the best benchmark performance and is usually the team that complete all the challenges.

The judges, along with the two CHPC staff members in charge of the competition, then decide who the other two people in the international team will be. They also choose two reserves.

Ashley was chosen as one of the two to be part of the international team.

“Dell is our sponsor,” explains Ashley. “They sponsor a trip to their headquarters in Austin, Texas, as well as to the Texas Advanced Computing Centre in either late January or early February next year.

“Here we’ll receive a tour of the facilities and mentoring from the technicians. In late June next year we’ll be heading to Frankfurt, Germany, to take part in the ISC student cluster competition.

“We’ll be competing against international teams from places such as China and India. South Africa won the first time we entered in 2013 and also in 2014. We came second this year so the stakes are high for us next year.”

Congratulations and good luck, Ashley.