ClusDur — Durham University’s Student Cluster Competition Team and HPC society

We are ClusDur, Durham University’s Student Cluster Competition Team and official HPC society operating under DU CompSoc. Our society consists of enthusiastic Durham University students who explore the realms of HPC and scientific computing together! We jointly train our practical computer science skills to take part in national and international Student Cluster Competitions (SCCs).

SCCs are playful team competitions that allow students to enter the world of high performance computing. They foster team spirit, practical skills in performance optimization and system administration as well as experience with latest supercomputing technologies. SCCs are the perfect opportunity to get in contact with potential employers and enable you to gain new knowledge in a highly motivating and exiting environment together with like-minded peers.

What We Cover

The following is a list of what we previously covered in the society:

How to navigate a Unix shell (*sh, vim, tmux/zellij)
Downloading, building, and installing application manually (Autotools, Make, CMake) or using package managers (Spack, Nix)
Running distributed applications on a supercomputing cluster (Slurm, MPI)
Tuning scientific applications to get the best performance out of a system (HPL, NAMD, GROMACS, …)
Profiling bottlenecks in programs using traditional Linux tools (top, mpstat, iostat, free, vmstat, netstat, …) as well as eBPF-based tools
Tuning the Linux kernel to squeeze out the most performance and fixing issues seen in profiling (mitigations, jumbo frames, page size, CPU isolation, …)
Using Ansible to automate cluster provisioning for setting up essentials such as NFS or Slurm in a reliable way

This is a non-exhaustive list of what we cover. Members can suggest additional topic to investigate.

Competition History

CIUK – National in-person UK competition
2020 – 1st
2021 – 2nd
2022 – 1st
2023 – 2nd
2024 – 2nd and 5th
2025 – Ongoing, two teams

IndySCC – International remote competition in the US
2022 – 4th
2023 – 7th
2024 – 7th
2025 – Ongoing, two teams

ISC – International in-person competition in Germany
2023 – 10th
2025 – Planning on attending if we get the funding for hardware

Interested?

If you’re interested in becoming a member of the SCC team, get in touch with an email to the society lead, briefly stating:
* Your name
* Field and year of study
* Related experience (if any) through courses at university, hackathons, private projects, etc.

If you are interested in sponsoring our society, please send an email to our society lead!

Society Lead

Nam Le
4th Year Computer Science student
[email protected]

Academic Advisor

Dr. Karl Southern
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
[email protected]