Director-General Kuo-Ning Chiang of the NARL-NCHC (first from left) and Professor Yeh-Ching Chung (first from right) with the winning team of National Tsing Hua University at SCC11.

The SC Conference is an annual international conference for high performance computing, networking, and storage. It is considered the largest conference in the field that combines a trade show with a technical track. It also organizes programs to support emerging leaders in the high performance computing. In which the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) is designed to showcase the computational impact of clusters and open source software in the hands of motivated students.

With many well-qualified teams applying, the SCC selected eight teams for the final showdown in the SC11 conference held in Seattle, USA on November 12-18, 2011. The eight qualified teams included National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan; Boston University, University of Colorado, Purdue University, University of Texas of the United States; National University of Defense Technology of China; Costa Rican Institute of Technology; and Nizhni Novgorod State University of Russia. In the showdown, the SCC pitted eight teams against one another to see who could build and configured a cluster in 46 hours that accomplished the most work using "real world" computational codes in the least amount of time. In addition to time constraints, students worked within the parameters of the designated system and power configurations, and used open-source software to solve the applications pROVided to them. 

In the SSC11 competition, the National Tsing Hua University team, led by Professor Yeh-Ching Chung of the same university and partnered with the NARL's National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC), Acer and NVIDIA, took home the championship for the second time in a row.

Since 2007, when the SC Conference first held its SCC, the NARL-NCHC has been actively supporting college teams to take part in the competition. Before SSC11, the NARL-NCHC has offered attending students a variety of computing resources and training on the key topics including the performance of high-performance computing cluster. In this connection, towards nurturing the next generation of talents in supercomputing, the NARL-NCHC will continue the endeavor that was initiated in relation with the inception of SCC.