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Seven Global Teams Compete in SDSC’s Third Annual Single-Board Cluster Challenge

Published July 16, 2025

By Kimberly Mann Bruch

Team of students around a table of computer hardware.

A UC San Diego team won the Third Annual Single-Board Cluster Competition held at SDSC. Credit: Aarush Mehrotra

The Third Annual Single-Board Cluster Competition (SBCC) was recently held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), part of the UC San Diego School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS). Organized by the UC San Diego IEEE Supercomputing Club (SCC) and sponsored by SDSC and RADXA, several global collegiate teams competed by using single-board computers and other similarly simple hardware to create miniature supercomputing clusters and rank them using industry-standard high-performance computing benchmarks. 

“The club is a great way for students to get experience in parallel computing,” said UC San Diego IEEE Supercomputing Club President Ian Webster. “This competition has been the most fun group project I’ve ever worked on.”

In this competition, student teams are challenged to create the most efficient single-board computer cluster that can perform complex tasks while using the least amount of power and resources with total costs under $6,000. 

“We were pleased to have two local cluster teams and six remote teams,” said Mary Thomas, a computational data scientist at SDSC and SBCC advisor.

Specifically, there were six teams: two representing UC San Diego with four remote teams hailing from Aalborg University, Texas Tech University, the University of Kansas and Clemson University.

The winner of the competition was UCSD Team 1. "It was a great experience getting new hardware for the club, demonstrating its capability, and working together to win," said Aarush Mehrotra, co-lead on UCSD Team 1.

Co-lead Gauri Renjith agreed and said, "We're looking forward to reusing this hardware for future club projects."

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Kimberly Mann Bruch
SDSC Communications