Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the ISC20 conference has been transformed into a virtual event.
The team "Not Only FLOPs", made up of six students from the Facultat d'Informàtica de Barcelona (FIB-UPC) and guided by six advisors from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), are participating in a new edition of the Student Cluster Competition at the ISC20 Conference. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the ISC20 conference has been transformed into a virtual event, and the HPC Advisory Council, organizing the Student Cluster Competition, decided to keep the competition allowing all teams to race using the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) cluster in Singapore as a playground.
The NotOnlyFLOPs team has been trained since December 2019 by six BSC researchers. Students and advisors met weekly at BSC premises until the Covid-19 outbreak forced the lockdown. The training continued on video conference during March and April with the rising apprehension that ISC would be canceled (as indeed happened).
The NotOnlyFLOPs team had also to face another change as the original idea was to participate with a cluster powered by Arm CPU, the same technology we carry on our pockets enclosed in our phones. Due to the new rules of the competition, the team had to abandon the original plan and migrate to the NSCC cluster, which is powered by standard Intel processors plus NVIDIA GPU accelerators.
The organizers of the competition assigned to the 14 international teams six challenges: four complex HPC applications, the Coding Challenge, and the AI challenge. Teams will be awarded considering the performance of the proposed solutions and the technical interview of a panel of international judges. A special "Fan Favourite Award" is given to the most on-line voted team.
You can help them win the Fan Favorite Award by voting for "UPC Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya" at the following link! http://bit.ly/scc20-bsc
You can follow and give support to the team through Twitter @NotOnlyFLOPs.
More info about the Student Cluster Competition here.
Voting is open until June 22nd.
About the Student Cluster Competition
The ninth ISC-HPC-AI Advisory Council (HPCAIAC) Student Cluster Competition will take place online, utilizing the supercomputing platforms at the National Supercomputing Center Singapore.
Co-organized by the HPC-AI Advisory Council and ISC, the Student Cluster Competition will run from June 1 – June 24, 2020. The award ceremony will take place live during the ISC 2020 online event.
The ISC Student Cluster Competition encourages international teams of university students to showcase their expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition that fosters critical skills, professional relationships, competitive spirit and lifelong comraderies.