National Center for High-performance Computing
NCHC Hosts 2025 High-Performance Application Competition: NTHU’s “TODO” Team Wins Championship
The 4th High Performance Application Competition (2025 HiPAC), organized by the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC), National Institutes of Applied Research (NIAR), under the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), concluded with a fruitful success yesterday on August 7. After three consecutive days of performance tuning and intense programming challenges, the championship and a cash prize of NT$100,000 went to Team “TODO” from National Tsing Hua University (NTHU). The runner-up and second runner-up were claimed by Team “A Large Mound”, also from NTHU, and Team “Attention” from National Taichung University of Education (NTCU), respectively. The teams showcased the younger generation’s strong capabilities in high-performance computing (HPC) technologies and exceptional teamwork.
A total of 11 teams advanced to the finals of the 2025 HiPAC. In the finals, within 49.5 hours, teams were required to use the dedicated hardware provided by the organizers to build a basic cluster computing system and environment, conduct performance testing and tuning for the designated problems, solve application-based tasks, and tackle hidden challenges. Continuing its hands-on, application-oriented approach to problem design, this year’s competition, which is in line with international trends, incorporated quantum computing and large language models (LLMs) into the application scenarios for the first time, not only encouraging students to apply innovative thinking in problem-solving but inspiring their drive to explore future technologies.
Most notably, three of the finalist teams included high school students, representing a total of seven high schools across Taiwan. Some students from Taipei, Taoyuan, Taichung, and Kaohsiung even worked together as a team, demonstrating that HPC talent cultivation in Taiwan has been steadily extending to younger levels. This also highlights the younger generation’s passionate interest and potential in supercomputing technologies.
After the competition, NCHC will screen representative teams from among all participating students for advanced training and support them in entering international student cluster competitions held at major global high-performance computing conferences, such as the SC Conference: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, in the United States and the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Europe. Through this educational program, NCHC aims to nurture HPC seed talents with global vision and practical experience. NCHC General Director Chau-Lyan Chang said, “We are delighted to see the younger generation boldly taking on HPC challenges and gaining hands-on experience in the process of program optimization. NCHC has long been committed to establishing Taiwan’s self-reliant and trustworthy supercomputing platforms. By hosting the HiPAC, we hope to discover more young talents aspiring to technological research and development, and work together to lay a solid foundation for Taiwan’s computing power and AI development.”
The HiPAC is one of the few student competition platforms in Taiwan that focuses on the practical operation of supercomputers. It will continue to guide participants to develop core competencies in system construction, software performance optimization, and application acceleration. NCHC will further enhance the internationalization of the contest’s problem design and the integration of advanced technologies, while fostering industry-university collaboration to broaden and deepen the applications of high-performance computing in both scientific research and industry, and nurturing Taiwan’s talent with the core competitiveness required in the era of AI and computational science.
