The FAUSION team is ready for the ISC Student Cluster Competition

The ISC 2025 in Hamburg, taking place from 10 to 13 June, is one of the most prestigious international stages for promoting the use of high-performance computing (HPC). The conference aims to encourage international knowledge, innovation, and teamwork in this area, including a conference, an exhibition, and a Student Cluster Competition (SCC).

The SCC is a competition involving teams of Master's students from around the world, who are asked to tackle a series of complex challenges related to high-performance computing and data centre management. In addition to testing their technical skills in a dynamic and stimulating environment, participants have the opportunity to forge lasting friendships, expand their professional network and deepen their valuable technical knowledge.

The FAUSION team, with representatives from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) and Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), is composed of six Master's students enrolled in the Master's programme in Computational Science at USI Faculty of Informatics. The team is led by student Jonah Holtmann (FAU/USI) and supported by PhD students Aditya Ujeniya (NHR@FAU) and Daniel Vega (CI/INF/USI).

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of MEGWARE, the team has access to three compute nodes equipped with four NVIDIA H200 GPUs each. Recently, the students had the opportunity to visit MEGWARE's headquarters in Chemnitz during a two-day visit that included an in-depth tour of the development centres and benchmarking clusters, as well as meetings with experts from various company departments.

Day two was packed with deep dives into energy-efficient architectures, exploring solutions to stay within power budgets while maximising performance. These insights are crucial as the students gear up for upcoming competitions.

The six members of the FAUSION team:

Alberto - a double-degree Master's student for EUMaster4HPC, is in his first year at USI in the course of computational science. He is interested in HPC aspects, such as parallelisation, HPC architecture, data structure, and coding language in general. His hobbies are coding, watching movies and playing instruments like piano/guitar.

Georg is currently pursuing the third semester of a double-degree Master's program in Computational Engineering (FAU) and Computational Science (USI), with a focus on high-performance computing, heterogeneous computer architectures, and numerical simulations. In his free time, he enjoys playing the guitar, engaging in sports, hiking, and fixing things.

Tornike is currently in the second year of a double-degree Master's program at LUT (Finland) and USI, focusing on high-performance computing, AI-driven solutions, and physical simulations. He has contributed to SimMS, a CUDA-powered kernel used in chemical discovery, drawing on his electromagnetics and computational optics background.

Johannes is currently in the second semester of his Master's in computer science at FAU. He likes tinkering with unconventional hard- and software environments to potentially speed up program runtime. Outside the digital world, Johannes is a volunteer firefighter who engages in many local communities, where he helps organise events.

Nikita, is a third-semester student at the FAU; he started his studies as an "early student". Aside from computer science, he enjoys sightseeing, going to the gym, and cycling. Always looking to learn new things, he is interested in all fields of CS, especially functional and low-level systems programming.

Christoph is currently in his seventh semester of FAUs Computational Engineering bachelor program. His specialisation is in signal processing and information theory, but he has also taken numerous HPC-centred elective courses on numerical simulation. When not studying, he enjoys planning pen and paper games, playing the piano, rock climbing, and 3d modelling and printing.

The team has worked hard throughout the semester to prepare for the competition and is now ready for four days of benchmarking until they drop. In June, they will board the train to Hamburg — a cool trophy and bragging rights await.