HPCAC-ISC Student Cluster Competition 2026 Award Ceremony

This award ceremony, hosted by Brian Sparks of the HPC-AI Advisory Council (NVIDIA), celebrated the 2026 ISC Student Cluster Competition, which involved 31 teams and about 180 students, with 60 students from 10 teams present on-site. ISC program chair Rosa Badia praised the competition's blend of training, deployment, and demonstration and urged hardware vendors to continue supporting teams. Sponsors WEKA, represented by its CEO, and Huawei were recognized; WEKA noted the addition of IO and large language model inference tasks that mirror current industry workloads. The Romeo Supercomputer Center supported the remote portion, providing 48,000 submitted jobs and 30,000 GPU hours. On-site teams competed under a 6,000-watt power budget, having to source equipment from vendors, manage lead times, and run applications end to end like a real supercomputing center. In the online competition, National University of Defense Technology placed third, Nanyang Technological University second, and Peking University first, with Peking's performance-enhancing code slated to be upstreamed into the DFTB-PLUS GitHub repository. On-site, National Tsing Hua University achieved the highest LINPACK at 330 teraflops, Nanyang placed third, Tsinghua University second, and Team Raclette from ETH Zurich was named grand champion. Sparks thanked mentors, judges, and committee members, and noted applications for the next competition open in August, with a deadline in November.