Updated

Updated · HPCwire · Jul 1

ETH Zurich's RACKlette Wins 15th ISC Cluster Competition, Beating 10 Global University Teams

Updated

Updated · HPCwire · Jul 1

ETH Zurich's RACKlette Wins 15th ISC Cluster Competition, Beating 10 Global University Teams

Q: With different winners for speed and online events, who is the true student supercomputing champion?

ETH Zurich’s RACKlette is the closest thing to the overall student supercomputing champion at ISC 2026, because it won the main in-person Student Cluster Competition title. The apparent conflict comes from ISC awarding different honors for different skills. ETH Zurich won the onsite overall competition in Hamburg, beating teams including Tsinghua University and Nanyang Technological University. That title reflects the broadest test: designing, building, tuning, and operating a cluster under a 6-kilowatt power cap while running a mix of scientific and AI workloads. In other words, it rewards all-around performance rather than a single metric. National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan was the speed leader, taking the Highest LINPACK Onsite Award with 335 teraflops. That makes it the benchmark champion for raw LINPACK performance, not the overall winner of the full competition. Peking University was the online competition champion. That is a separate format with its own winner, but it is not the same as the onsite title decided at ISC’s live event. So the fairest answer depends on what “champion” means. If it means the official overall winner of the flagship ISC Student Cluster Competition, it is ETH Zurich. If it means fastest system on the LINPACK benchmark, it is National Tsing Hua University. If it means best team in the remote format, it is Peking University.

1 articles · Updated · HPCwire · Jul 1

ETH Zurich’s student team RACKlette took first place at the 15th ISC Student Cluster Competition in Hamburg, finishing ahead of Tsinghua University and Nanyang Technological University in the in-person finals.
10 university teams competed by designing, building and optimizing high-performance computing clusters under strict power limits while running demanding scientific and AI applications.
RACKlette’s victory was its second in the competition, a notable result in an event typically dominated by East Asian teams.
Months of preparation with ETH professor Torsten Hoefler and CSCS engineer Hussein Harake underscored the contest’s role as a training ground for future HPC and AI specialists at ISC 2026, which drew more than 4,000 attendees.

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HPCwire54d ago

ETH Zurich 'RACKlette' Wins 15th Annual ISC Student Cluster Competition in Hamburg

With different winners for speed and online events, who is the true student supercomputing champion?

What winning hardware strategy let one student team beat 30 rivals under a strict power limit?

Beyond the trophy, how do these contests shape the future of real-world AI and supercomputing?

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1 total

HPCwire54d ago

ETH Zurich 'RACKlette' Wins 15th Annual ISC Student Cluster Competition in Hamburg

ETH Zurich's RACKlette Wins 15th ISC Cluster Competition, Beating 10 Global University Teams

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