On May 22th, the final round of 2015 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC15), the largest supercomputer contest in the world, ended in Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan city, Shanxi province, China. Tsinghua University won the champion, National University of Defense Technology was Silver Winner, Nanyang Technological University from Singapore gained Highest LINPACK, Sun Yat-sen University obtained e Prize Award. Application Innovation Awards were taken by Tsinghua University, National University of Defense Technology, National Tsinghua University and Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Best Presentation went to Taiyuan University of Technology.
ASC15 was co-oragnized by Asia Supercomputer Community, Inspur Group and Taiyuan University of Technology. Since the grand launching in Nov. 2014, there had been 152 teams of 135 universities from 6 different continents had registered for the ASC15, with an increase of 85% to those of ASC14. What’s more, the number of overseas universities reached 47, increasing 135% to that of last year. After tough competition in the preliminary round, 16 teams worldwide were qualified for the finals, which was held from May 18th to May 22th.
At the closing ceremony, Prof. Mo zeyao, the chairman of evaluation committee, made a decription of the competition process. He suggested that as a group, the performance of all the participating teams this year improved a lot than ever before, and many universities in the world had excellent performance on supercomputing application innovation. Members of Tsinghua University team were so wonderful that they produced good results on all the 7 questions and finally won the champion with a large superiority on total grade. Nanyang Technological University from Singapore accomplished impressive high performance on Linpack, 11.92 Tflop/s and broke the world record under 3000W power budget. As for the most eye-catching e Prize, it adopted SKA (square kilometer array telescope) data processing application Gridding. The e Prize Winner Sun Yat-sen University successfully optimized the codes and correctly computed all the three workloads, which increased 600 times of the original application performance and decreased to 1/20 of the previous system energy consumption. Therefore, this accomplishment provided SKA—the largest astronomy international cooperation project all over the world with outstanding and efficient supercomputer designing suggestion.
Mr. Wang endong, the initiator of ASC and chief scientist in Inspur Group, believes that supercomputer currently gets closer and closer relations with many other fields, such as science and technology, economy and culture etc.. As a result, the supercomputer will become the key technology after the Internet, making important influence on all aspects of the society. Meanwhile, ASC will give a strong impetus to supercomputering application development and talents’ cultivation not only in China but also for the rest of the world.
Prof. Lv Ming, the president of Taiyuan University of Technology thinks that ASC15 encourages more and more college students to learn, understand and love supercomputer—-the cutting-edge technology. Also, this competition will have a significant boost for interdisplinary academic study and talents’ cultivation in universities and prompting students’ creativity and innovation.
ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge, which is initiated and organized in China and supported by relative experts and institutes in Asian, European and American countries, aims to promote the supercomputing talents’ communication and cultivation in various regions and countries. Its goals also include to advance the supercomputing application and developing ability, to elaborate driving science and technological force of supercomputer, and to promote the scientific and industrial innovation. After four-year growth, ASC has become the largest supercomputer contest.