Props to team top flops.
Virtual this year, the SC20 Student Cluster Competition was still all about teams vying for top supercomputing performance in the annual battle for HPC bragging rights.
That honor went to Beijing's Tsinghua University, whose six-member undergraduate student team clocked in 300 teraflops of processing performance.
A one teraflop computer can process one trillion floating-point operations per second.
The Virtual Student Cluster Competition was this year's battleground for 19 teams. Competitors consisted of either high school or undergraduate students. Teams were made up of six members, an adviser and vendor partners.
Real-World Scenarios In the 72-hour competition, student teams designed and built virtual clusters running NVIDIA GPUs in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Students completed a set of benchmarks and real-world scientific workloads.
Teams ran the Gromac molecular dynamics application, tackling COVID-19 research. They also ran the CESM application to work on optimizing climate modeling code. The reproducibility challenge called on the teams to replicate results from an SC19 research paper.
Among other hurdles, teams were tossed a surprise exascale computing project mini-application, miniVite, to test their chops at compiling, running and optimizing.
A leaderboard tracked performance results of their submissions and the amount of money spent on Microsoft Azure as well as the burn rate of their spending by the hour on cloud resources.
Roller-Coaster Computing Challenges The Georgia Institute of Technology competed for its second time. This year's squad, dubbed Team Phoenix, had the good fortune of landing advisor Vijay Thakkar, a Gordon Bell Prize nominee this year.
Half of the team members were teaching assistants for introductory systems courses at Georgia Tech, said team member Sudhanshu Agarwal.
Georgia Tech used NVIDIA GPUs wherever it was possible, as GPUs reduced computation time, said Agarwal.
We had a lot of fun this year and look forward to participating in SC21 and beyond, he said.
Pan Yueyang, a junior in computer science at Peking University, joined his university's supercomputing team before taking the leap to participate in the SC20 battle. But it was full of surprises, he noted.
He said that during the competition his team ran into a series of unforeseen hiccups. Luckily it finished as required and the budget was slightly below the limitation, he said.
Jacob Xiaochen Li, a junior in computer science at the University of California, San Diego, said his team was relying on NVIDIA GPUs for the MemXCT portion of the competition to reproduce the scaling experiment along with memory bandwidth utilization. Our results match the original chart closely, he said, noting there were some hurdles along the way.
Po Hao Chen, a sophmore in computer science at Boston University, said he committed to the competition because he's always enjoyed algorithmic optimization. Like many, he had to juggle the competition with the demands of courses and exams.
I stayed up for three whole days working on the cluster, he said. And I really learned a lot from this competition.
Teams and Flops Tsinghua University, China
300 TFLOPS
ETH Zurich
129 TFLOPS
Southern University of Science and Technology
120 TFLOPS
Texas A&M University
113 TFLOPS
Georgia Institute of Technology
108 TFLOPS
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
105 TFLOPS
University of Warsaw
75.0 TFLOPS
University of Illinois
71.6 TFLOPS
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
64.9 TFLOPS
Peking University
63.8 TFLOPS
University of California, San Diego
53.9 TFLOPS
North Carolina State University
44.3 TFLOPS
Clemson University
32.6 TFLOPS
Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg
29.0 TFLOPS
Northeastern University
21.1 TFLOPS
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
19.9 TFLOPS
ShanghaiTech University
14.4 TFLOPS
University of Texas
13.1 TFLOPS
Wake Forest University
9.172 TFLOPS
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
02/05/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
01/05/2026
January 5 2026, 18:30 (PST) NBCUniversal's Peacock to Be First Streamer to ...
01/04/2026
January 4 2026, 18:00 (PST) DOLBY AND DOUYIN EMPOWER THE NEXT GENERATON OF CREATORS WITH DOLBY VISION
Douyin Users Can Now Create And Share Videos With Stun...
03/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
03/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
03/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
03/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
03/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
03/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/03/2026
NBC Sports selected Imaginary Forces to create the main title sequence for the M...
02/03/2026
The NFL announces the launch of the NFL Draft Innovation Challenge, a new crowds...
02/03/2026
The World Teleport Association (WTA) has named Skyline Communications' DataMiner SatOps solution as a finalist for the 2026 Teleport Technology of the Year ...
02/03/2026
Ventum Tech announces a strategic partnership with Pixotope, a real-time graphic...
02/03/2026
Victory , a free, ad-supported sports streaming service, announces the launch of...
02/03/2026
Global powerhouse Delta Goodrem to represent Australia at this year's Eurovi...
02/03/2026
SBS brings together prominent voices to discuss rising social division and seek ...
02/03/2026
NITV Unveils Wednesday Night Sport Night
Media releases
A Midweek Hub for Blak Sport
Flagship NRL program Over The Black Dot moves to Wednesdays at 9:30pm
...
02/03/2026
Rohde & Schwarz demonstrates FR1-FR3 carrier aggregation, advancing 6G readiness Rohde & Schwarz and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. have reached another pivotal ...
02/03/2026
MELBOURNE, Fla., March 2, 2026 - L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX) today announc...
02/03/2026
Harvey Norman tops New Zealand's biggest ad spenders as retail leads and telcos and beverages sure Auckland March 3, 2026 - Nielsen's New Zealand'...
02/03/2026
aconnic AG (ISIN: DE000A0LBKW6), Munich, and Arqit Quantum Inc. (Nasdaq: ARQQ, A...
02/03/2026
Advanced Systems Group, LLC (ASG), a technology and services provider for media creatives and content owners, has appointed Jody Boatwright as Chief Strategy Of...
02/03/2026
Lightware, an industry leader in signal management, is reinforcing its commitment to simplifying complex AV environments with the continued evolution of its TPN...
02/03/2026
ZEISS Cinema opens its doors to an exclusive screening, filmmakers Q&A and hands-on showcase of the new ZEISS Aatma lens family on Tuesday, March 10, 6:00-9:00 ...
02/03/2026
To expand the creative potential of the compact Astera QuikBeam, DoPchoice introduces the SNAPBAG Round. The new light-shaping accessory transforms the powerfu...
02/03/2026
Douglas Dubler
On a rooftop in New York City, veteran photographer Douglas Dubler watched the sun's angle shift across the urban landscape, his internal cl...
02/03/2026
ZEISS is expanding its Otus ML lens family with the introduction of the new ZEISS Otus ML 1.4/35. This manual-focus lens is designed for photographers who live ...
02/03/2026
Matthews Studio Equipment now offers the new Dinkum Systems White FlexiMount and Phone Mount Kit, a compact, highly adaptable setup for mobile content creation...
02/03/2026
Luxembourg, February 26, 2026 - SES and Africa Mobile Network (AMN) have expande...
02/03/2026
02 03 2026 - Media release Ausfilm and Screen Australia launch joint UK market initiative
Ausfilm and Screen Australia have announced Partner with Australia (...
02/03/2026
Monday 2 March 2026
Saturday Night Live UK announces writing team
L-R: Jonno Johnson; Charlie Skelton; Celya AB; Omar Badawy; Gr inne Maguire; Laura Claxton; ...
02/03/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Unveils the Trailer for 53 Sundays, the New Film by Cesc Gay
Entertainment
02 March 2026
GlobalSpain
Link copied to clipboard
Dis...
28/02/2026
With two features seen in Formula 1 coverage, the broadcaster aims to bring view...
28/02/2026
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth addresses a crowd of approximately 1,500 L3Harris employees in Camden, Arkansas, as part of his Arsenal of Freedom tour....
28/02/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
28/02/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
28/02/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
28/02/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
28/02/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
28/02/2026
Berklee Presents Mambo Mania: Eguie Castrillo and the Berklee All-Stars Big Band...
28/02/2026
Berklee Announces Two New Summer Programs in Los Angeles The Berklee Music Business Program and Electronic Music Production and Sound Design Workshop bring imme...
28/02/2026
AI-RAN is moving from lab to field, showing that a software-defined approach is ...
28/02/2026
Autonomous networks - intelligent, self-managing telecommunications operations -...
28/02/2026
Back to All News
Final Trailer for BEASTARS Final Season Part 2' Roars Tow...
28/02/2026
New way to intentionally discover molecular glues could expand drug discovery Scripps Research scientists and colleagues show how drugs that eliminate certain d...
27/02/2026
The E.W. Scripps Company names Oliver Gray as Vice President, Network Sports and...
27/02/2026
The Gotham Sports App, the exclusive direct-to-consumer streaming home of MSG Networks and the YES Network, is now available for purchase through Prime Video fo...
Props to team top flops.
