Undergrads power up global recognition
- Wits University
Wits students earn international recognition for energy-efficient computing research.
Four undergraduate students have received international recognition for research aimed at improving the energy efficiency of high-performance computing (HPC).
Suné Toerien (4th year Information Engineering), Vele Nefale (3rd year Information Engineering), Ntandoyenkosi Memela (2nd year Computer Science) and Mubeed Dewan (3rd year Computer Science) submitted a poster to the ACM Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Conference in Switzerland last month, where it placed second in the student competition.
The team’s paper, Extending the Life of HPC Systems in Resource Constrained Environments: Mapping Productivity-Energy Trade-offs in Memory-Bound Workloads via DVFS and Core Scaling on Repurposed Hardware, was subsequently submitted to the ACM Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2026 conference in Minneapolis, USA.
There, it won the prize for Best Student Short Paper, further recognising the students’ contribution to sustainable and affordable scientific computing.
Their research examines how adjusting processor core counts and operating frequencies can reduce energy use in certain applications categorised as memory-bound applications, such as weather forecasting and climate change. This research particularly focuses on applying this to repurposed HPC hardware, which is significant to resource-constrained environments.
Preliminary results show that targeted core reduction can significantly improve productivity-to-energy efficiency and help extend the useful life of existing computing infrastructure.