Mission

The Utah High School Supercomputing Competition was formed by a consortium of UHSSC, Inc, a Utah 501(c)3 non-profit corporation, the University of Utah Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC), the Salt Lake Valley Science and Engineering Fair (SLVSEF) and the Utah Education Network (UEN).

The mission of UHSSC is to introduce Utah high school students to the techniques involved in programming and managing Computer Clusters, which consist of many smaller machines working in concert.

History

In August of 2011 Kasimir Gabert got in touch with his former high school Physics teacher, Dan McGuire. Kasimir had access to a retired supercomputer that he wanted his alma mater to use to enter the SC11 Competition, a challenge sponsored by the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis.

Acknowledging a noble idea, McGuire tried to expand it by contacting local education and government concerns to broaden the effort to a statewide competition. A quick response was received from Brian Haymore and Julia Harrison at the University of Utah's Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC), as well as Jody Ostrander from the Salt Lake Valley Science and Engineering Fair (SLVSEF) and Laura Hunter at the Utah Education Network (UEN). CHPC volunteered hardware from a retired supercomputer in their facility, SLVSEF offered a space to hold the competition and awards ceremony, and UEN covered expenses for the competition space.

In short order the Utah High School Supercomputing Competition (UHSSC) was born!