The 2025 application period is closed. Watch this space for news about our 2026 session.

HPC Cluster Engineer Academy is a 9-week paid internship that will give you direct experience with running and maintaining high performance computing (HPC) systems.

Livermore Computing invites you to apply to our HPC Cluster Engineer Academy for next summer. Although it doesn’t get much attention in traditional academic coursework, cluster engineering is a main focus of HPC centers around the world.

For every software developer or computational scientist who enjoys a fast, reliable, and up-to-date computer system, there’s a cluster engineer who maintains it. As an HPC Academy intern, you’ll learn the basics of cluster engineering and system installation under the guidance of our experts. This internship provides practical, real-world application of knowledge no HPC center—like LLNL—can live without.

A cluster is a system of interconnected computers called nodes. They are connected through a high speed network and generally use the same hardware and operating system. Clusters enable computer scientists to run their code more quickly than on a single computer—the more nodes in the cluster, the higher the computing capacity. A cluster with thousands of processing nodes is a supercomputer, like the systems we operate at LLNL. We are home to some the world’s fastest supercomputers including El Capitan.