STUDENT CLUSTER COMPETITION ISC’20 TEAM

The Student Cluster Competition starts in July every year. University students from various universities around the country are trained on Linux systems, as well as high-performance computing. Their training concludes with an assignment that requires each team to build a prototype cluster on the cloud. The teams selected from this round go on to compete in the national round of the Student Cluster Competition, which takes place at the CHPC National Conference.

This year, a team of six students from the University of Witwatersrand and the University of the Western Cape took first prize, and two reserves from the University of Western Cape and University of KwaZulu-Natal were chosen. The students are Guy Axelrod, Victoria Bench, Michael Beukman, Sivenathi Madlokazi, Alungile Tshangela and Mikhail Vink. The two reserves are Stephanie Agenbag and Kalreen Govender. This team will represent South Africa at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, in June 2020.

“The purpose of the competition is to expose young university students to high-performance computing and equip them with Linux skills. It’s a great opportunity for the CHPC to be able to provide the students with real workplace skills that they can go on and use in their careers,” said CHPC’s Matthew Cawood.

The University of the Western Cape is very proud to have student Mikhail Vink part of the international team representing South Africa next year in Frankfurt Germany.

The Student Cluster Challenge was sponsored by DellEMC, Eclipse Holdings, Intel, Altair, Bright Computing, Mellanox and Microsoft Azure.