National Taiwan University Wins Student Cluster Competition

A team from National Taiwan University (NTU) secured the overall championship at the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) held in conjunction with Supercomputing 2025 in St. Louis, Missouri. This marked NTU's debut in the competition, with the team leveraging hardware and technical collaboration from Giga Computing.

The SCC challenges student teams to demonstrate their skills in high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) by completing various scientific simulations, AI workloads, and system benchmarks within a strict 10,000-watt power limit. NTU's team outperformed eight other university teams to claim the top prize.

This year's competition tasks included benchmarks such as HPL and the Exascale Climate Emulator, as well as a "Mystery Application" (ACTS). These required teams to make rapid decisions regarding system architecture design, performance tuning, and resource allocation under pressure. The NTU team was faculty-advised by Professor Chun-Yi Lee.

Giga Computing provided support to the NTU team for two months leading up to the competition, supplying four GIGABYTE G494-ZB4-AAP2 GPU servers. These servers were configured with AMD EPYC 9655 processors, NVIDIA H200 GPUs, and ConnectX-7 network interface cards. The company also offered technical guidance on optimizing power consumption and thermal management, critical factors for succeeding within the competition's power constraints.