Proud of the North Stars Team Thammasat University to Win Merit Award at the APAC HPC-AI Competition 2025

I'm excited to share a truly proud moment: our Thammasat University North Stars Team from the B.Sc. in Digital Technology and Innovation, Faculty of Science and Technology, Lampang Campus has earned a Merit Award at the 2025 APAC HPC-AI Competition, one of the most competitive and respected HPC/AI student competitions in the region.

This year was the toughest we've ever experienced. More than 52 teams from over 10 countries participated (up from 42 last year). Japan returned in full force with 15+ university teams, many supported by RIKEN—Japan's premier national research institute. And the AI task this year used DeepSeek-R1 with 671B parameters (the largest model ever in this competition), by far the most demanding workload ever included.

Like other teams, we fostered young first-time participants and entirely new members onboarding to the NCI GADI, NSCC's APIRE2A, ASPIRE2A+, and Firmus AI Cloud. Our team also received support from ThaiSC as always, which enabled the analysis of huge performance traces collected from NCI and NSCC.

From novices to benchmarking real-world workload on five HPCs – what an extraordinary six months these students spent! Despite the difficulty, the North Stars team secured a Merit Award, which is a huge encouragement and a powerful affirmation.

Applause to Fellow Competitors

My special applause to all the teams who made it to the end, not only the winners, because I know how hard it is to keep grit and determination to fight the most challenging tasks.

Deeply admire the National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), which won the overall Champion title for the fourth consecutive year and also placed in both the Excellent HPC and Excellent AI categories. National Taiwan University (NTU Taiwan) tied for Second Place and won Best AI Performance, demonstrating exceptional optimization of the DeepSeek-R1 (671B) model. Congratulations to all the winning teams from Taiwan, China, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Japan. The Japanese model for cultivating 15 new teams this year was the biggest storyline of 2025.

Gratitude to the Community

Biggest thanks to all kind-hearted human beings from the HPC-AI Advisory Council, the NSCC Singapore, and the NCI Australia for putting together their efforts to inspire and cultivate young HPC multipliers through this technical challenge competition. The community is not stopping here; more will be trained, firming up regional strength, and every year, new participants will return even stronger.

This Merit Award marks an important milestone in Thammasat's journey to becoming a recognized force in high-performance computing and AI innovation.

I'd like to share our thoughts presented to the judge before our presentation. Beyond HPC, we learn to realise the human in us.