Ward Melville Senior Named Regeneron Scholar

Ward Melville senior Tina Shuxin Xing was named a 2026 Regeneron Scholar by the Society for Science, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors. Over 2,600 students applied this year from 826 high schools across 34 states, Washington, D.C. and China and Tina was one of only 300 chosen to be named a Scholar.

Tina’s project, entitled Carbon-Aware Reserve Allocation and Checkpoint Scheduling for GPU Sustainability, aims to make computer systems more environmentally sustainable. Computer clusters rely on graphics processing units (GPUs) for demanding tasks, which can be environmentally taxing.

“An existing algorithm reserves spare GPUs by quickly allocating reserves, but does not consider carbon impact,” explained Tina. “To address this, I examined carbon intensity trends using Electricity Maps and created synthetic datasets to model the patterns. Incorporating this into the existing algorithm and using a subgradient method to optimize a function combining cost and carbon intensity made it ‘carbon-aware’ while prioritizing reservations when cleaner electricity is available. Plots were generated from using the modified algorithm to determine effectiveness, which showed a convergence in reserve allocation. Results demonstrated that the algorithm successfully reduced total carbon-related cost without compromising reliability, converging to a sustainability-cost balance.”

The Ward Melville science department shared its pride in Tina’s achievement and the significance of her research.

Each of the scholars will be awarded $2,000 and the 40 finalists will be announced later this month.