South African undergraduate students have placed in the top three positions of the international Student Cluster Competition every year since they first competed in 2013. Team South Africa, made up of undergraduate computer science and engineering students have taken the top honours in 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2019, and came second in 2015 and 2017. The team was third in 2018.

High-performance computing is a relatively new field in South Africa and the CSIR-managed Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town boasts one of the largest processing clusters on the continent – a collection of networked processors that provide the computing power needed to solve complex computing problems. The CHPC assists South African researchers to study complex climate models or sift through genomics data. The centre also assists industry in a variety of other fields.

It all began in 2011, when the team from CHPC, whilst attending the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany, realised the potential of the Student Cluster Competition as an opportunity to create awareness for high-performance computing as a career and to develop the high-performance computing pipeline in the country. The team started planning a national competition that would culminate in a team of six who would represent South Africa on the international stage.