Dec. 19, 2024 - CSU Channel Islands (CSUCI) students and their mentors are preparing
for the world of big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) by learning and sharing
all they can about High-Performance Computing or HPC.
HPC is a way of combining a network of computers to create a more powerful system designed to handle data or problems too big for one computer. There’s a growing demand for expertise in HPC, given the rise of AI, machine learning and data-intensive tasks across various industries like scientific research, finance, and healthcare. Job growth for HPC is expected to be significantly faster than the average for all occupations.
“High performance computing powers the modern AI movement, providing the raw computational power needed for developing and deploying AI applications like ChatGPT,” said Assistant Professor of Computer Science Scott Feister. “HPC systems are the Ferraris of computing. Every element of these systems is state of the art, and no expense is spared in reaching the highest performance possible.”
Enthusiasm about HPC began about a year ago after CSUCI won the 2023 HPC Winter Classic Invitational Cluster Competition. Team captain Berkhan Berkdemir was eager to keep interest high in HPC, so he started an HPC club. And Feister plans to recruit another winning team to compete in the 2025 HPC Winter Classic during the Spring semester.
The new HPC Club spent months learning all they could about HPC through various professional
webinars. They learned how to build ultra-high-speed communication networks and manage
specialized software for HPCs. Then, in late November, Feister led a group of six
students, including Berkdemir, to the International Conference for High Performance
Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis in Atlanta, Georgia - the SC24 conference.
“It was a really, really great week,” Feister said. “All of the students got to experience a world they had never seen before, and they were enthusiastic about going back to campus to evangelize about HPC.”
The conference drew more than 17,000 people from all over the world with various backgrounds including computer or electrical engineering, mathematics, statistics, data analytics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and cybersecurity. HPC industry professionals were on hand with displays and information about opportunities and advances in careers involving supercomputers.
“The conference had a major impact on me,” said CSUCI Computer Science major Taylor Asplund. “It was my very first professional conference, and it gave me an opportunity to learn what it’s like to be in a professional environment.”
Now that the students have returned, the HPC Club is working to let more students know about HPC and the doors it can open in terms of careers after graduation. Thanks to a large donation of computing equipment to CSUCI from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC, a world leader in HPC), Berkdemir said the club is also working on building a high-performance computer cluster at CSUCI. This donated computer cluster will use more than 3,000 central processing unit (CPU)-cores - which is essentially the brain of a computer - all at once, with performance thousands of times higher than a student laptop. A student laptop uses about four to eight CPUs. It will be used, installed and managed by the students.
“My goal is to enable this cluster so it can give all students a chance to learn about HPC, and how this hardware is special,” Berkdemir said.