PSC Interns To Represent US at International Student Competition

A team of interns from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center(opens in new window) has been selected to represent the United States next year at an international high-performance computing (HPC) competition for students. PSC’s Benchmark Beasts will be one of 10 teams across the world, and the only one from the states, chosen to compete in Hamburg, Germany, at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC25) in June 2025. The team will also be among 24 selected to compete in a virtual HPC competition starting in April.

The interns, supported by PSC, were funded by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

“Competitions like these are excellent opportunities for students to supplement their academic studies through additional learning opportunities and hands-on experience in a professional environment,” said Valerie Rossi(opens in new window), PSC’s manager of education and student programming, who coached the Benchmark Beasts. “Plus, they are just fun!”

The international Student Cluster Competition is held at ISC25, the global gathering of supercomputing professionals, as part of its mission to expose young people to HPC and careers in the field. The competition, hosted by ISC High Performance and the HPC-AI Advisory Council, introduces student teams to the HPC community, including the systems and the applications that are being used by scientists and researchers. For the competition, the student teams will use two supercomputers, the DKRZ Levante system at the German Climate Computing Center, and Bridges-2(opens in new window), PSC’s National Science Foundation-funded flagship system.

The Benchmark Beasts originally formed to compete at the IndySCC competition at SC24, the annual U.S. supercomputing conference. During a summer session from May to August 2024, the students learned a number of HPC skills including networking, the Linux operating system, parallel programming and a general introduction to the field. In the fall of 2024, the students learned about the supercomputing applications NAMD and ICON as well as studying benchmarking tools such as MLPerf. At the final 48-hour competition at SC24 in Atlanta, the Beasts competed with eight other teams from across the world in a contest focused on reproducibility, the ability of a computing solution to provide consistent, accurate results with different inputs.

The Benchmark Beasts consist of:

• Tom Eckrich, a computer engineering senior at Pitt. He is the team captain.
• Daniela Bellido Rodriguez, a mathematics sophomore at CMU with plans to double-major in computer science.
• Yun Dong, a senior at Pitt majoring in computer engineering.
• Caden Empey, a sophomore studying computer engineering at Pitt.
• Jeff Kim, a senior at CMU, majoring in computer and electrical engineering (Kim will not be participating in ISC25 in Germany).
• Aaron Park, a sophomore studying computer and electrical engineering at CMU. 
• Tanvi Verma, a senior at Pitt, majoring in computer engineering.
• Julia Zhang, a double-major statistics and machine learning senior at CMU.

“For me, as one of the sophomores in the team, going to SC24 and competing in IndySCC was eye-opening and valuable,” Park said. “I’ve learned a lot this past summer and fall, not only about supercomputing and HPC, but also what it’s like to be a professional in these spaces.”

The ISC25 student competition will begin with a virtual opening ceremony on April 1, 2025, and will complete by May 9. The in-person opening ceremony in Hamburg will be on June 10, with the 48-hour competition ending in an award ceremony on June 12.