Durham’s Student Cluster Competition team is an all-time competitor in the CIUK Student Cluster Competition team: Since the very first installment of the competition, Durham has always sent a team to this event, and Durham teams have always ended up among the top two finalists.

UK Student Cluster Competition

The UK Student Cluster Competition is an annual event hosted as part of the CIUK (Computing Insight UK) conference: teams of six students are given four different challenges over a period of four months culminating in four further in-person challenges at the CIUK conference in Manchester in December. The challenges cover a wide area ranging from benchmarking of new compute systems with state-of-the-art application codes to making a code run on purpose-built, bespoke AI hardware.

Our students' performance

The students participate in their free time, sacrificing many evenings and even a whole weekend to end up in a top spot after the actual conference. In 2024, Durham was able, for the first time, to send two teams, i.e. 12 students, to the competition in Manchester: Teams CompuDur and ClusDur. And it was very, very close. In the end only a few points were missing for ClusDur to claim the top spot, so they finished with a strong second place. The team recruits predominantly from Durham’s Computer Science degree, although we have members from NatSci and MISCADA on board. More participants are welcome. While we can only nominate a handful of participants per competition, the regular Wednesday evening team meetings are typically attended by well over 20 students.

Plans for 2025

For this year, the students will, for the first time, start to practice their competition skills on real, bare metal, made available through Alastair Basden from ICC. We plan to join the IndySCC next, an all-virtual, over the summer competition hosted under the umbrella of the US Supercomputing conference series before we again aim for a top spot at CIUK 25.

Find out more

Those involved with the student competition teams from Durham include

• Karl Southern, Assistant Professor Teaching from the Computer Science Department.
• Chung Loi, PhD student from the Computer Science Department.
• Tobias Weinzierl, Professor from the Computer Science Department.
• Karen Bower, Senior Research Officer from Advanced Research Computing (ARC).

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