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Second Life: Enabling a Student Special Interest Group through Decommissioned HPC Systems

Published: 17 July 2024 Publication History

Abstract

The prevalence of High Performance Computing (HPC) in scientific research continues to grow, and with this growth, the importance of HPC education and training also increases. However, limited access to advanced research computing resources continues to impede workforce development in resource-constrained environments. In this poster, we describe our student-run HPC special interest group at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and provide an overview of the practical benefits it provides for students. Our group leverages repurposed decommissioned HPC systems to enable practical hands-on experience with HPC and computing clusters for undergraduate students at our university. We further discuss our group’s approach to selecting and preparing teams for student cluster competitions, where historically we have enjoyed notable success.

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            cover image ACM Conferences
            PEARC '24: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2024: Human Powered Computing
            July 2024
            608 pages
            ISBN:9798400704192
            DOI:10.1145/3626203
            Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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            Publication History

            Published: 17 July 2024

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            Author Tags

            1. Africa
            2. Education
            3. HPC Ecosystems Project
            4. Repurposing
            5. Student Cluster Competition
            6. Students in HPC
            7. Workforce Development

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