Recently, Asia Supercomputer Community (ASC) announced that the final for 2015 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC15) will be held by the Taiyuan University of Technology (TUT), a not-known university in Shanxi province, China. Also, it is the very first time for ASC to come to the Midwest of China as the ASC12-ASC14 was held respectively in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.
Besides Taiyuan, there are a lot cities having competed to be the host of ASC15 including Zhengzhou, Xi’an, Jinan, Qingdao, and Changsha. TUT has won the opportunity due to its superiority in accommodation environment, the organizing experience, and reception ability.
TUT is experienced in holding many big events, for example the Chinese University Basketball Association (CUBA), while ASC15 will be the initial international competition it will hold. TUT has paid much attention to the supercomputing talents cultivation and has special incentive system to motivate students to get involved. One team from TUT, led by Prof. Xiaofeng Liu, had outstanding performances in the ASC14’s first round.
More important, TUT has established a much completed teaching system for supercomputing, more specifically, including supercomputing courses for undergraduates, and the innovation incubation in schedule. As for ASC15, TUT selects contestants from the whole school publicly, hoping to make supercomputing known to more people through the ASC challenge.
Officials from the ASC committee explains that it is the enthusiasm of supercomputing in TUT that touched the committee most. So that’s why TUT is so lucky to win the host this year. ASC aims to promote the supercomputing talents’ cultivation, to spread the supercomputer related knowledge to the world, and then make HPC from elites to ordinaries. Also note that the deep culture background of Shanxi province could be quite attractive to the international IT people.
The ASC has been successfully held for four years, with thousands college students, professors, scientists, and HPC users contributed, which has helped a lot in the promotion of supercomputing in China and even in the world. 152 teams from 135 universities in 6 continents have joined in the ASC15–the biggest ASC competition till now.