Team Information
Location: Lubbock, Texas
Established: 1923
Enrollment: 40,332
Mascots: The Masked Rider
This is the third year that Texas Tech has fielded two teams: Team Matador and Team Red Raider. The goal for each of the teams is to, of course, win the overall championship. However, there’s a lot to be said for winning The Battle for Lubbock and beating their cross-campus rivals, right? In 2022, Team Red Raider grabbed the Bronze Medal, finishing third overall, and topping the seventh place Team Matador. That was very sweet.
But in 2023, the roles were reversed, with Red Raider relegated to seventh while the Matadors took down the Bronze. Something has to give in 2024.
The 2024 edition of Team Red Raider has two seniors and a freshman, all Computer Science majors (one with a Math minor). All of them are new to the competition and their HPC background is unknown at this point. We’ll learn more about them in our interview and will do our best to stir the pot when it comes to their rivalry with the Matadors.
2024 Red Raider Team Roster:
Michael Gibich: "I'm Michael, currently a senior in Computer Science at Texas Tech, graduating this May. I'm really excited about embedded systems, cybersecurity, and data compression. My goal is to explore how these fields intersect and find opportunities that combine them all!"
Yash Kumar: "Hi, I'm Yash Kumar, a freshman at Texas Tech University studying computer science. I love making unorthodox projects and refining them into optimal solutions. Most of my work is done in Rust, OCaml, and C, and recently I've been tinkering with low-powered mobile computers. I'm hoping to show off what I've taught myself and my adaptability in this competition. In the future, I want to work somewhere performance is above all; this competition has shown me high performance computing is just the field to be in."
Joshua Windle: "I'm Joshua Windle and I attend Texas Tech University. I'm a senior this year majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science. My interesting include data science, machine learning, and cyber security. In the future I'd like to do research involving AI and cyber security. My technical skills lay within the field of cyber security, however, I'm currently in process of expanding my knowledge base to include machine learning to tackle new threats."
Faculty Advisor/Coach:
- Michael Beebe (former Winter Classic competitor!)
2023 Winter Classic
Ellora Ashish: A senior from Wichita Falls, Texas that is a computer science major at Texas Tech University. Has interests in app development, cloud computing, and software development.
Roger Rodulfo Chacin: A computer science major and math minor at Texas Tech. When not at school or at work, Roger loves to work on personal projects like a personal portfolio website and play sports.
"Hello! My name is Luke Fournier and I'm a senior at Texas Tech studying Computer Science. I have experience developing code for startups and hope to continue my passion for programming on larger scales through this competition."
2022 Competition Highlights
Red Raider Team Roster:
- Dante Ramirez
- Jahir Montes
- Michael Beebe
- Nadine Salem
Faculty Advisors/Coaches:
- Dr. Tom Brown
- Dr. Yong Chen
Texas Tech Matadors/Red Raiders Dinner – the Sequel: In the second video, we find the team at “Torchy’s Tacos”, another fine Lubbock institution. This place has a hilarious menu, including entries dubbed “Trailer Park”, “Tipsy Chick”, “Tokyo Drifter”, and the ever popular “MoFaux.” With the Trailer Park taco, there’s a “Make it Trashy” option that substitutes queso for lettuce. The team and I bantered about their meals, the competition standings, and what was coming up in a fun filled video. Check it out.
Texas Tech Matadors/Red Raiders Meal Night #1: this was pretty cool, the team manager, the Mighty Misha Ahmadian, got both teams together not once, but twice for meals events. Their first bread-breaking took place at the “One Guy From Italy” Italian restaurant in Lubbock, TX.
What really made me smile was obvious it was that the teams were having a good time together. During this first meal, I shared the ORNL final results with them, which were pretty good. The Matadors scored 95% and the Red Raiders took home a perfect 100%. During the video, I passed judgement on their meal choices in an even-handed way, handing out plaudits for the meat-oriented selections and expressing doubt about a buffalo cheese and chicken pizza and Margharita pizza selection.
Texas Tech Red Raider Update: In this interview we talk with the Red Raiders about the just completed Oak Ridge machine learning challenge. ML was very new to this set of students, like all of the other teams, and it took them a goodly amount of time to get up on the task. The team is sitting in second place when this interview took place. What I love about this team is their bravado, with Michael Beebe calling out Tennessee State by name “we’re coming for your Tennessee!” Gotta love that, it’s a lot of fun.
Texas Tech University – Team Red Raider: We had some vexing audio issues during our talk with Team Red Raider. In response, we fired the rest of our technical staff and sent the TTU teams a better mic so this doesn’t happen again. of our technical staff and the acquisition of a better mic for use with the Texas Tech teams. The Red Raiders are a science hungry bunch with three of the four sporting double or triple majors and the fourth a Ph.D. student. At the time of filming, the Red Raiders were sitting pretty in third place and had already won the Highest LINPACK award. But their second place HPC Pop Quiz score landed them squarely in second position overall. We also got a chance to stir the pot between them and the TTU Matador team and try to build up some bad blood. Keep an eye on this….