UCSD - University of California - San Diego

12/05/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 12/05/2025 11:31

UC San Diego Team Takes Third Place at SC25 Student Cluster Competition in St. Louis

Published Date

December 05, 2025

Article Content

A team of University of California San Diego undergraduates won third place in the 2025 Student Cluster Competition (SCC25) at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, held this year in St. Louis, Missouri. The UC San Diego SCC25 Team Sea++ is a group within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) at UC San Diego.

"Our goal is for each member of the team to specialize and build deep expertise in one of the competition tasks, while ensuring that they are fully supported every step of the way," said Gauri Renjith, who serves as the supercomputing chair for IEEE at UC San Diego. "Our team's participation and success in this competition was made possible by the support of our industry partners. Our vendors worked with us to secure the team's competition hardware, provided expert guidance to the team, and alleviated the shipping and travel expenses that enabled our team and its two alternates to reach St. Louis."

The team received support from the School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences' San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and Jacobs School of Engineering Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Computer Engineering Departments. Team Sea++ and their mentors - SDSC Research Scientist Mary Thomas and Computer Science Lecturer Bryan Chin - spent months preparing a high performance computing (HPC) system for the international challenge, which brings together top student teams from around the world to design, build and optimize small supercomputing clusters to run complex scientific workloads in real time. UC San Diego's six 2025 participants include Gauri Renjith, Ferrari Guan, Jinru Li, Luiz Gurrola, Ryan Estanislao and Shing Hung. Supporting the team were over a dozen additional UC San Diego students - comprising the home team.

Preparation for the competition merged weekly team meetings with flexible, self-paced training modules - maximizing both individual and group efforts. Each student took the lead on one application or benchmark while supporting another, a structure that encourages teamwork and shared problem-solving. With guidance from the home team, SDSC mentors and alumni - and access to the center's Expanse supercomputer and vendor research clusters - the team was backed by an exceptional network of expertise and resources.

"Our students with the Supercomputing Club did a fantastic job at the Student Cluster Competition at SC25," Thomas said. "We are grateful to our cluster vendor team, including International Computer Concepts (ICC), Applied Data Systems and Gigabyte Computing, who sponsored and supported the team with the high-performance system they used to compete - helping bring their ideas to life."

Built on two server nodes provided by Gigabyte, the team's system integrated AMD EPYC CPUs, AMD Instinct GPUs and ScaleFlux storage. Ian Stewart, ICC-USA mentor, assembled the system system components from AMD and Gigabyte with additional hardware help from Ryan Emmerich at Applied Data Systems. Students completed the final assembly, configuration and performance optimization at SDSC.

"It's inspiring to work alongside our talented students," Chin said. "They put in incredible effort to get this system ready and we are so proud of their accomplishment."

Now in its sixth year, the UC San Diego SCC program gives students a hands-on opportunity to apply theoretical knowledge to practical, high-performance environments - an experience that continues to open doors for many alumni to careers in HPC, data science and research computing.

"The program impacts a larger community than the students who get to travel to the competition," Thomas explained. "Our program also includes a group of students, called the 'home' team, who participate in the SCC preparation alongside the team - including learning about high performance computing, how to work with the cluster hardware and how to run the competition applications. In addition, our program connects students from the team and the UCSD Supercomputing Club to events like Supercomputing, to vendors and the world of HPC."

UC San Diego Team Sea++ gratefully acknowledges its sponsors:

  • Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD)
  • Applied Data Systems, Inc.
  • CIQ, Inc.
  • Giga Computing Technologies, Inc./GIGABYTE
  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
  • International Computer Concepts (ICC-USA)
  • Neuvys Technologies
  • NetApp
  • Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP
  • San Diego Supercomputer Center
  • UC San Diego Computer Science and Engineering Department
  • UC San Diego
  • Women in HPC, SDSC Chapter
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