Supercomputers are often favored because of their high performance and operational rates. As a result, more research continues to be made in this space.

To tame issues like power consumption in supercomputing, Purdue University and Indiana University have teamed up in a competition meant to tackle current pain points, according to Karl Oversteyns (pictured, left), HPC systems engineer student at Purdue University.

“So we’re a joint team between Purdue and IU,” he said. “It’s a multi-part competition where we’re going head to head against other teams from all across the world, benchmarking our supercomputing cluster that we designed. The main constraint is time and the power consumption.”

Oversteyns  and Lucas Snyder (pictured, right), intelligent systems engineer at Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics, spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Savannah Peterson and David Nicholson at SC22, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the vitality of higher education in supercomputing, as well as the competition the students competed in. (* Disclosure below.)

Importance of higher education in supercomputing

To take supercomputing to the next phase, higher education will play an instrumental role. Therefore, more emphasis should be made in this sector, according to Oversteyns.

“I think higher education has a lot of potential in this field,” he stated.

The application section of the competition emphasizes real time, which represents dealing with fluctuations experienced in the real world, according to Snyder.

“Currently, we’re working on the application phase of the competition,” he stated. “So everybody has different specialties. And, basically, the competition gives you a set of rules and you have to accomplish what they tell you to do in the allotted timeframe and run things very quickly.”

Fascinated by high-performance computing during a summer internship, Snyder believes this sector has immense potential. Therefore, talent should be nurtured in this field, he added.

“So my background is intelligence systems engineering, which is kind of a fusion between … bioengineering and then also more classical computer engineering,” he noted. “So my background is biology actually. So after graduation, I am planning to go to grad school. IU has a great accelerated master’s degree program, so I’ll stay an extra year and get my master’s.”

Since unmanned systems utilize remote sensing, high-performance computing comes into the picture. This plays a pivotal role in boosting efficiency and minimizing cost, according to Oversteyns.

“My background, I’m a major in unmanned aerial systems. So this is a drone, so commercial applications, not immediately connected, as you might imagine. Although there’s actually more overlap than one might think,” he noted. “A lot of it actually leverages high-performance computing in order to map, to visualize — much replacing either manual mapping that used to be done by humans in the field or helicopters.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the SC22 event:

(* Disclosure: This is an unsponsored editorial segment. However, theCUBE is a paid media partner for SC22. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the main sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE