The curtain came down on the inaugural National Student Cluster Building Competition on the 26th of January 2021. This pilot program saw eight national universities compete namely Africa University, Bindura University of Science Education, Chinhoyi University of Technology, Harare Institute of Technology, Great Zimbabwe University, National University of Science and Technology, Midlands State University and University of Zimbabwe. The training on cluster building started in June 2019 and was supposed to span a single academic year but due to the Covid-19 pandemic stretched longer than expected. The actual competition took place on the 25th of January 2021 and the participants were assessed on; Operating System Initial Configurations and set up, Network Setup, HPC Cluster Services and Authentication Setup, Resource Manager Configurations, Monitoring System Configurations and Parallel programming. Speaking at the award ceremony, Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development, Prof. Dr. Amon Murwira, who was also the Guest of Honor, said Zimbabwe is determined to become an upper middle income economy and more by 2030 as prescribed by His Excellency President Dr. Emmerson Mnangagwa. He also said this competition was another deliberate step in increasing national capability and work towards that goal. The winner of the pilot competition was team University of Zimbabwe, followed closely by team Midlands State University in second and team National University of Science and Technology in third place. Prof. Dr. Murwira also announced that all the participating students had won a scholarship up to the end of their tertiary education.
Visualize the events in a video available at https://youtu.be/EPhJ6sT2xy0
