On May 18, 2015, the 2015 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC15) final will be held in Taiyuan University of Technology, Shanxi province, China. Students of 16 university teams from all over the world will compete for six type awards including the Champion, the Silver Prize, the e Prize Computing Challenge Award, the Highest Linpack Award, the Best Presentation Award, and the Innovation Award. It is reported that ASC15 final’s awards reach about 250,000 Yuan, which also makes this competition unique in the supercomputer competition history.
ASC15 finals include a number of famous universities in the world, therefore the fierce toughness is unavoidable. Tsinghua University that repeatedly won the ASC and ISC Champions, National Tsing Hua University that is the only SC Champion in the final, the ASC14 Silver Prize winner Nanyang Technological University, and Massachusetts Green Team (MIT, Boston University, Northeastern University, U.S.) are all possible to win the Champion. Kasetsart University, joining in the ASC for the very first time, has qualified for the finals after beating many Asian, European and American teams. Kasetsart is regarded as dark horse in the ASC15 and will set a new record for ASC if it wins the Champion.
It is said that the ASC15 finalists will face multiple challenges in the final. They should finish supercomputer system design and construction under 3000W power consumption budget, and benchmark Linpack through the HPL. At the same time, the final will also test each team’s understanding of applications, ask them to finish five popular application optimizations, and test its effects by practical operation results. What’s more, each team will also have to deal with a mysterious application announced during the final, which will comprehensively test their knowledge structure and performance level on spot.
Dr. JI (Kitty) Qing, the director of the Asia Supercomputer Community, said that to won the ASC Champion is a wide-ranging reflection of the ability for a team, which includes knowledge to design and build supercomputer system, experiences of optimizing application, code and system, depth of understanding of the application, capability to do English presentation for overall scheme and so on. So a team may miss the champion due to any mistaking in any step.
In addition to the Champion, the e Prize computing challenge award is also most-watched. In order to encourage the young talents to boldly create technology innovation, solve supercomputer application problems, challenge the limits of computing performance and use supercomputers to promote application breakthroughs in science, engineering, and data analysis, ASC has established e Prize Computing Challenge Award to the team that completes massive parallel optimization for the specified application and achieve the highest scalability in the competition. This e Prize in ASC15 final will be issued to the Gridding application from the SKA science application.
A new change in this competition is that the ASC Committee has specially established presentation award to reward the outstanding teams in the presentation part of the competition. Competition presentation, as a part of competition, mostly reflects the international character of the ASC, in which representatives will do report of their competition plans in English. That is a big challenge for Chinese teams and it is quite usual for them to lose points in the view of many previous competitions.
After four-year development, the ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge has become the top supercomputer competition that owns the most participants, the most perfect format, and the highest level worldwide. The number of participating teams reach 152, and the growth rate up to 85% compared with 82 teams last year. Based on increasing participants and growing impacts, the ASC rapidly popularize supercomputer related tech and application to the ordinary.