A new student design team at Waterloo Engineering is tackling one of computing's most demanding disciplines: high-performance computing.
Computer engineering students James Redekopp and Karl Keshavarzi founded UW High Performance Computing (UWHPC) earlier this year within the Sedra Student Design Centre (SSDC). Their faculty advisor is Dr. Tahsin Reza, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. UWHPC is now wrapping up its first project, a high-performance Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) simulation, built from the ground up in C++.
The idea grew out of a physics simulation Keshavarzi had been building, and conversations between the two co-founders about how to speed it up. "The biggest reason [we launched UWHPC] was that the kind of team we wanted to join didn't really exist," Redekopp said.
UWHPC gives students hands-on experience designing and optimizing software for demanding computational problems, structuring its work around real technical projects. VMC is used to study the physics of quantum systems with many interacting particles — problems too complex to solve exactly, so the software instead uses statistical sampling to estimate properties of the system. The faster that software runs, the bigger and more complex a problem the team can realistically tackle.
"[Our biggest] challenge was that performance optimization is rarely as simple as making one change and seeing the program get faster," said Redekopp. Working through those problems as a team, he said, meant they could tackle them from different angles and learn from each other along the way.
Next term, the team is moving into machine learning (ML) systems, with an early focus on graphics processing unit (GPU) optimization and specialized compilation to improve the performance of computationally intensive ML workloads. More broadly, UWHPC takes on whatever high-performance computing problem its members are excited about — scientific computing, compilers, distributed systems, performance engineering and anything else where software speed and efficiency matter.
They are recruiting now for the Fall 2026 term.
Keshavarzi said students shouldn't be put off by not already knowing the technical side — GPU programming, scientific computing and performance optimization aren't prerequisites. "Technical concepts can be taught," he said, "but the motivation to dig deeper is what we really look for."
Learn more about UWHPC's work on the team's website, and find details on current recruitment — including a hands-on onboarding challenge open to all applicants — on their onboarding page.
UWHPC is just one of more than 40 student-led design teams at Waterloo Engineering, each giving students a chance to build skills that go well beyond the classroom. Browse the full directory of teams to explore the rest.