Tartu IT students defend honour of Baltics at major international IT competition

Until 22 June, UT students of Computer Science will, as the only Baltic team for the second year in a row, compete in Frankfurt at the international student cluster competition. The student team feels strong because the experience of the previous competition has taught a lot.

At the contest, teams build a computer cluster in a real-time challenge and the committee tests the performance of the clusters by running various applications—for example, weather forecast and visualising large scale data and multiplying matrixes. This requires good knowledge of system management, programming language C/C++ as well as compiling and profiling.

Supervisor of the student team, Programmer at UT Institute of Computer Science Artjom Lind said that the students are thoroughly prepared for the main test which is optimising the applications for your system: “Thanks to sponsors we have much more efficient hardware to use this time.”

Team members believe they have learned much from last year’s experience and are ready to compete with teams from the world’s top universities.

Representative of the team, UT student of Computer Science Andre Tättar believes the competition is a great way to teach working with large-scale data because nearly all research achievements come with the help of high-performance computers: “The contest is a great way to improve the position of UT and Estonian IT education in the world because representatives of nearly all the strongest IT universities and enterprises will be at the conference.”

Similarly to last year, the competing teams come from universities in Germany, Spain, South-Africa, Singapore, USA and China.

Estonians can support their team by choosing the fan favourite at http://goo.gl/53gk8A. The voting starts on 20 June at 16:00 (Estonian time) and lasts until the end of the competition on 22 June.

The contest is organised by HPC Advisory Council and nearly 3,000 visitors are expected at the event. The students’ participation in the contest is supported by the IT Academy, IBM, Mellanox.

Additional information: Andre Tättar, UT student of Computer Science, 53408530, andre.tattar@ut.ee
Artjom Lind, supervisor of the student team, Programmer at UT Institute of Computer Science, artjom.lind@ut.ee