Second Life: Enabling a Student Special Interest Group through Decommissioned HPC Systems

The prevalence of High Performance Computing (HPC) in scientific research continues to grow, and with this growth, the importance of HPC education and training also increases. However, limited access to advanced research computing resources continues to impede workforce development in resource-constrained environments. In this poster, we describe our student-run HPC special interest group at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and provide an overview of the practical benefits it provides for students. Our group leverages repurposed decommissioned HPC systems to enable practical hands-on experience with HPC and computing clusters for undergraduate students at our university. We further discuss our group's approach to selecting and preparing teams for student cluster competitions, where historically we have enjoyed notable success.