Purdue and IU joint team to compete in HPC student competition
Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) has teamed up with Indiana University’s (IU) Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) to support a team of students competing in IndySCC, a world-renowned supercomputing competition. The team—named “INPack”—began working together in late August and will tackle the final phase of the competition in November at the 2025 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC; SC25).
IndySCC is a remote, cloud-based competition that runs parallel to the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) held each year at SC. Unlike the SCC, IndySCC does not require teams to build their own supercomputing cluster and bring it to SC. Instead, teams are provided with allocations on Jetstream2, an NSF-funded cloud resource hosted at IU, and are given ample time for practice and training in the months leading up to SC. IndySCC culminates with a 48-hour contest during which the teams are tasked with learning scientific applications, applying optimization techniques for their chosen architectures, and running an industry-standard benchmark on the supercomputer. This final phase of the competition takes place concurrently with SCC at SC, though IndySCC competitors are not required to compete in person at the event.
The 2025 IndySCC competition will see the return of the INPack team, a joint effort between Purdue and IU. This will be the first competition for the group since the 2023 IndySCC event. Of the six team members, five are new to the student cluster competition series, 
with one veteran returning from the 2023 team. The INPack team members for this year are as follows:
- David Piedra, Purdue University
- Dominic Yoder, Purdue University
- Gautam Hari, Indiana University
- Ryan Jacobson, Indiana University
- Sky Angeles, Indiana University
- Tri Nguyen, Indiana University
INPack began preparations for the competition in late August through asynchronous meetings and hands-on practice on Jetstream2. The group is working under the supervision of mentors from both universities: Charles Christoffer, Erik Gough, and Luke Monroe from Purdue, and Shawn Slavin (primary advisor) and Winona Snapp-Childs from IU. The team, including the mentors, came together for an in-person meet-and-greet and collaborative training session earlier this semester in Indianapolis. Another such meeting is scheduled for early November in Bloomington.
“IndySCC is a major professional development opportunity for the students,” says Christoffer. “Basically, this is a chance for the students to experience what RCAC and PTI do in a little microcosm. From the ground up, they learn how to build an HPC system and tune it to meet the performance needs of the applications. The experience gained alone is worth the time and effort, not to mention all the fun they have in the process.”
“The IndySCC is a great opportunity for students to work together to overcome many frequent challenges of research computing,” adds Slavin. “This partnership between Purdue and IU showcases the joint commitment to education and training the next generation of HPC workforce.”
Although teams can compete in IndySCC remotely, INPack will travel to St. Louis, Missouri, to participate in person and gain the full experience of the SC25 conference. The competition will take place November 17-19, 2025. To learn more about the IndySCC competition, please visit: https://sc25.supercomputing.org/students/indyscc/
More information about the INPack team can be found in this SC25 Blog post: From Spark to Flame: Introducing the IndySCC25 Teams
RCAC operates all centrally-maintained research computing resources at Purdue University, providing access to leading-edge computational and data storage systems as well as expertise and support to Purdue faculty, staff, and student researchers. To learn more about HPC and how RCAC can help you, please visit: https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
The Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) at Indiana University is a university-wide research and development enterprise that bridges computer science, informatics, high-performance computing, and cyberinfrastructure to enable and accelerate discovery, scholarship, and creative activity. Founded in 1999, PTI is structured around a core unit within the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology and a set of affiliated centers and labs that deliver open-source software, advanced computing services, data tools, and interdisciplinary collaboration. To learn more, please visit: https://pti.iu.edu/pti/
Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu