Under the instruction of Professor Yeh-Ching Chung, the six student team of Yu-Cheng Chen (senior), Yi-Man Ma (senior), Yi-Jun Chen (senior), Zhen-Wei Huang (senior), Yu-Jun Xue (senior) and Meng-Kai Liao (junior) went to New Jersey, USA to compete in the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) held at the world's largest international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis (SC) last November. There, they honored Taiwan by showing exemplarily skill, defeating seven other competing schools from Europe and America, claiming the championship for National Tsing Hua Universtiy.

To prepare for this competition, the six students of the Computer Science Department started their training a year ago for all sorts of system management and high performance computing software. To participate in this competition, the students not only had to deal with the pressure of a heavy curriculum and the application of graduate school but they also had to give up most of their summer and winter breaks to attend a grueling training program. The well-designed training transformed the students from knowing very little about high performance computing into solid system management personnel with the ability to calibrate and analyze high performance computing software.

During the competition, the teams relay in a 46.5 hour time frame, under a 26 Amps limitation, build and run a cutting-edge commercially available small computer cluster to calculate and answer problems from the three different fields i.e., Cosmic Evolution, Drug Design, and Meteorology. The key to the team's success is decoding. There were two million problems prepared for the competition. The NTHU team solved fifty-seven thousand problems, solving more problems than the entire sum of all the problems solved by the seven other teams, astonishing even the judges!

Professor Yeh-Ching Chung said, "To achieve such results, one must have a clear understanding of every detail about the software". He continued to mentioned how in a email, after the competition, the game host said that because of the NTHU team's thorough computing for every detail was the key to their success in this competition!

Since the first SCC in 2007, the game has amassed much experience and gained a great deal of recognition. The competition has attracted the participation of students from all over the world and this year was one of the most exciting events in its history. This competition not only tests the skill of the students but also their teamwork and reaction speed. In the end, the champion goes to the team that finishes the most problems correctly. This is the third time a team from Taiwan has participated, but it is the first time they've won the grand prize!