Alces Flight to provide cloud HPC clusters for the first annual CIUK Student Cluster Competition

This first time virtual event will have students competing across different platforms in a quest to win sponsorship to the ISC HPC Student Cluster Competition in 2021.

The team at Alces Flight will be providing student cluster teams access to HPC on the cloud during CIUK’s first ever Cluster Competition. Designed to run from mid-October, and culminating at CIUK 2020 Online, students will engage in a series of tasks covering both hardware and software that will increase in difficulty as the finish line nears. The Alces Flight team will open the event by launching identical cloud HPC clusters for each team tailored specifically to meet the requirements set out by CIUK.

“We’ve been building ephemeral and federated cloud HPC environments for years so it makes perfect sense for us to share this capability with students hoping to pursue HPC as their future career,” said Cristin Merritt, Program Manager for Cloud HPC at Alces Flight,“As the only public cloud build in the competition we hope to set a high standard and show how well this platform works. We are honoured to be participating alongside some of the best providers in hardware and software and can’t wait to get the students on board.”

The Alces Flight team will utilise the OpenFlightHPC open-source stack to construct the cloud HPC environment for the students. OpenFlightHPC works on both on-premises and cloud platforms and forms the foundation for environment creation across our customer base. If you would like to learn more about how OpenFlightHPC or how Alces builds HPC environments that work on any platform simply click the links!

In the interest of fairness details of the construction of the cloud environment and how the students fared will be released following the successful conclusion of the event this December.