Alfaxad Yusuf Eyembe Takes 2nd Place at Google Data Centre Hardware Hackathon

Alfaxad Yusuf Eyembe, a KUAS Engineering student supervised by Dr. Sajid Nisar, participated in the 2023 Google Data Centre Hardware Hackathon in Google Japan’s Shibuya Office on August 25th, 2023. The hackathon was aimed to introduce students and early-career professionals to challenges faced by Google engineers in operating data centers that manage billions of search traffic on the web.

The event is by invitation only, where roughly 20 individuals were invited for the hackathon. Assigned in random teams, each team was given limited access to the internet and problem sets covering hardware assembly and troubleshooting, computer networking and Linux operating systems, and systems programming and scripting. The problem sets were to be solved in real-time, on real devices within specific time slots.

After an intense competition and rigorous evaluation by Google engineers and IT professionals, Alfaxad’s team was awarded the 2nd-place prize. In addition, his team also received the best teamwork award. Alfaxad said, “The competition sparked my interest in competitive programming and how to approach engineering problems at a large scale. I aim to use the technical insights I gained to advance in other competitive programming competitions and build scalable software and hardware solutions in the future.”

（Tadayuki Imai, Faculty of Engineering）