Cardiff University students debut at CIUK Cluster Challenge

Cardiff University’s undergraduate team from the School of Computer Science has achieved an impressive milestone in their debut at the Computing Insight UK (CIUK) Cluster Challenge, a prestigious High Performance Computing (HPC) competition.

Guided by Advanced Research Computing at Cardiff (ARCCA), the team competed against representatives from 15 universities across the UK. The competition featured a series of rigorous HPC challenges designed by leading industry professionals. These culminated in four rapid-fire tasks held at the CIUK 2024 Conference in Manchester, testing computational skills, teamwork, and problem-solving under intense pressure. Despite being newcomers, the Cardiff team excelled, securing an admirable 6th place overall. This excellent performance underscores the university’s commitment to fostering cutting-edge computational expertise and collaborative innovation.

“This is an impressive result for a team participating for the very first time,” said Jon Lockley, ARCCA Director. “Congratulations to all those who took part for their hard work and dedication.”

The CIUK Cluster Challenge showcased both the exceptional skills of Cardiff’s student team and the university’s significant contributions to the broader HPC community, emphasising the importance of developing the next generation of research computing professionals. It also gave the students a chance to attend the programme of talks given by leading experts from both academia and industry, and to network with potential employers.

The success of this debut team not only signals promising prospects for future participation but also coincides with exciting developments in Cardiff’s research computing capabilities, including the upcoming deployment of a new HPC cluster, “Falcon”, early next year and a move to a state-of-the-art data centre north of Cardiff.