FAUSION team is ready to compete once again in the ISC Cluster Competition 2026

The ISC 2026 in Hamburg, taking place from 22 to 26 June, is one of the most prestigious international stages for promoting the use of high-performance computing (HPC). The conference aims to encourage international knowledge, innovation, and teamwork in this area, including a conference, an exhibition, and a Student Cluster Competition (SCC).

Following a successful participation in last year's event, the joint student team FAUSION is returning to compete in the Student Cluster Competition at the ISC High Performance Conference 2026.

The team consists of double-degree master's students from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU, CS Master in Computational Engineering) and Università della Svizzera italiana (USI, INF Master in Computational Science). Scheduled for 23 to 25 June in Hamburg, the six-student team is once again supervised by PhD students Aditya Ujeniya (NHR@FAU) and Daniel Vega (USI). As in the previous competition, their objective is to design, build, and optimise a small supercomputing cluster, which will be put to the test using standard benchmarks such as HPL and HPCG, as well as complex scientific applications that track fluid dynamics, blood flow, and quantum mechanics.

To prepare for their second consecutive appearance, the team made a return trip to the headquarters of supercomputing specialist MEGWARE in Chemnitz. MEGWARE is sponsoring FAUSION again this year, providing a powerhouse hardware setup that includes three compute nodes loaded with a total of 12 NVIDIA H200 GPUs. During the two-day visit, the students worked alongside MEGWARE engineers to configure the cluster and run preliminary test benchmarks.

Returning to the ISC Student Cluster Competition marks a significant milestone for the team, offering an opportunity to address real-world data centre challenges and test cutting-edge hardware. The project also highlights the ongoing academic partnership between the German and Swiss universities. With their hardware locked in and lessons learned from the past, FAUSION is ready to take on the challenge in Hamburg once again.