The NTHU Team led by Prof. Yeh-Ching Chung and Associate Prof. Che-Rung Lee, and a group of seven students Meng-Kai Liao, Ke-Jou Hsu, Li-Wei Guo, Ci-Hong Deng, I-Cheng Lai, Ying-Chieh Wang, and Yi-Man Ma from the Department of Computer Science claimed victory at the Student Cluster Competition held in Seattle, U.S.A. It is the second time that a team from NTHU won the championship in this world's largest international contest in high performance computing, networking storage and analysis. NTHU team aced eight others teams representing China, United States, and Russia with their outstanding skills and knowledge.

When NTHU team was organized in January 2011, most members had no high-performance computing experience or background related to programming. To prepare for this competition, the team therefore had to go through an intense training in advance. These students not only needed to deal with their regular course work, they also had to sacrifice their winter and summer breaks, and sleeping time to take parts in intensive trainings, simulation tests, and learn to solve mechanical problems.

Unlike past competitions, this year's championship contest featured four types of scientific application programs and three of them were compatible with Accelerated Computing Graphic Processing Units (GPU). Though the team was trained and prepared, the pressure mounted as the competition got closer, because all participants were not only required to evaluate various aspects of the hardware devices of cluster computing system, they also had to face the increased complexity of resource allocation and performance evaluation.

During the 46.5 hours of competing, the team was required to estimate the minimum input time for executing all the applications and provide the most efficient allocation of system resources. Each team member was also required to monitor the conditions of the application at all times, and answer questions from experts on each application during the process. The competition challenges not only students' professional skills, but also their endurance, quick reactions, and time management.

With their extensive knowledge, and incisive analytic skills, NTHU team finished with three first places and two second places for the four scientific application contests and one HPCC application contest. Prof. Yeh-Ching Chung, the leader of NTHU team said, "when NTHU was announced the winner, the students cheered with tears in their eyes." He expressed his gratitude to the National Center for High-Performance Computing for its guidance and assistance and to Acer and NVIDIA for their enthusiastic support.