SOU students win best poster at high speed computing symposium

Three seniors from the SOU Computer Science program won the best poster award at the 2026 Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium’s HPC Symposium, held May 12 to 14 at Boise State University.

The SOU team – Brayden Stach, Laura Lovrien and Alec Clark – returned with valuable takeaways from the conference and the overall experience. They also won an all-expenses-paid trip to SuperComputing 26, an international conference for high performance computing that will be held Nov. 15 to 20 in Chicago.

“The networking was genuinely great,” the three SOU students said in their report on the Boise symposium. “There was a room with about 15 company booths (IBM, Intel, Amazon and others) open every day.

“We walked around, got some free merch and had real conversations with recruiters and engineers – everyone was really friendly and easy to approach, which made it simple to just walk up and start a conversation.”

The three said some specific examples of advice from recruiters included tailoring your resume to each job posting, including using AI to match the resume to the language in a listing; saying “yes” to extra work and projects early in your career, to gain experience; and making connections that will matter, by showing up and meeting people.

The high performance computing (HPC) symposium included a keynote address about the value of working across disciplines — such as computer scientists collaborating with environmental scientists, psychologists or others to produce results that matter.

The Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium (RMACC) is a collaborative group of academic and research institutions in the intermountain states whose mission is to enable the effective use of high performance computing – the use of computer clusters or parallel processing to perform complex calculations from massive data sets.

The organization’s annual symposium allows researchers, students and industry professionals to meet and explore how high performance computing is being used in research, AI and other work.

“If you ever get the chance to go to a conference like this, do it,” the SOU students said in their report. “The networking alone is worth it, the people are approachable and you don’t need to be an expert to get value out of it.”