Fourth Annual Asian Supercomputing Challenge Winners Revealed

By Tiffany Trader

May 27, 2015

The fourth annual Asian Student Supercomputing Challenge concluded last Friday evening with a grand celebration dinner for all the finalists, their advisers, and invited guests at the old Taiyuan University of Technology campus in Taiyuan, China. All 16 teams, nearly 100 students total, were being honored not only for their efforts over a grueling five-day competition, but for making it to the final round from an initial pool of 152 registered entrants in the largest student supercomputing contest in the world.

After two days of application debugging (Monday and Tuesday), followed by two days of application testing and presentations (Wednesday and Thursday), the awards were revealed to a packed audience at the closing celebration held on Friday afternoon. Presiding officials included president of the host institute Taiyuan University of Technology, Lv Ming, and the head organizer, Liu Jun, ASC initiator and general manager of Inspur HPC.

By competing in six application optimization tasks and one team presentation, each student group had the opportunity to earn 100 points total. Over $36,000 in prize money was awarded, thanks to the generous support of Inspur, Intel and other sponsors.

Here is the listing of this year’s winners along with their award amount.

Champion (~$16,000): Tsinghua University

ASC15 Champion - Tsinghua University - 600x

Silver Winner (~$8,000): National University of Defense Technology

ASC15 Silver - NUDT 600x

e-Prize (~$4,385): Sun Yat-sen University

ASC15 - ePrize - Sun Yat-Sen 600x

Highest LINPACK ($1,600): Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)

ASC15 Highest LINPACK - NTU 600x

Best Presentation (~$1,600): Taiyuan University of Technology

ASC15 Best Presentation - TUT 600x

Application Innovation Award (four x $1,600): Tsinghua University, National University of Defense Technology, National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan) and Shanghai Jiaotong University.

Teams are comprised of five undergraduate students and their adviser. The ASC committee and INSPUR provide teams with clusters, spare parts and hardware for the MIC optimization challenge (aka e-Prize challenge). As with the other student supercomputing challenges, there is a 3000 watt power consumption limit. If power consumption exceeds this limit continuously for more than 30 seconds, or goes over 3100 watts, the team must stop the current run and those results will be invalidated.

After the allotted application debugging period, the contest began in earnest with LINPACK benchmarking and five popular application optimization tests. ASC15 included three popular science apps – NAMD, PALABOS and WRF-CHEM – and one surprise app, which this year was the High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG) Benchmark. HPCG is a self-contained benchmark that generates and solves a synthetic 3D sparse linear system using a preconditioned conjugate gradient method. The benchmark is being considered as a more relevant way to rank HPC systems than the LINPACK benchmark, which has served the community well for many years, but is no longer representative of today’s HPC applications.

There is also an e-Prize challenge to test students’ ability to take serial code and parallelize it for the Intel Xeon MIC architecture. ASC aspires to see the e-Prize award become the Gordon Bell Prize of student supercomputing, and as such it is meant to be “practical, challenging, and interesting.” This year, the gridding portion of the SKA science application was selected for this difficult task.

Used in the largest international astronomy cooperation project SKA (square kilometer array telescope), gridding is one of the most time-consuming steps in SKA data processing. To reconstruct the image of sky from the data collected by the radio telescope, scientists need to take the irregular sampled data and map it onto a standardized 2-D mesh. The process of adding sampled data from the telescopes to a grid is called gridding. After this step, the grid can be Fourier transformed to create a sky image. Consider that the data produced by SKA per second is expected to exceed 12TB and nearly 50 percent of this astronomy data need to be processed through gridding.

It is the intention of the ASC committee that by participating in this challenge, the students are getting hands-on experience with supercomputing applications that are fundamental to solving the problems of Asia and the world at large. In addition to the gridding app, key to understanding the universe, students were also tested the molecular dynamics software NAMD, which scales to simulate molecules at massive core counts; the air quality numerical model WRF-CHEM, which is widely used to simulate the forming process of smog; and PALABOS, a software tool that offers a powerful environment for CFD simulations.

The winners in the specific categories and their scores were as follows:

LINPACK: Nanyang Technological University with 11.92 teraflops, a new record.

NAMD: Tsinghua University with a score of 12.61 points.

WRF-CHEM: National University of Defense Technology with 12.10 points.

National Tsing Hua University and Shanghai Jiaotong University were also awarded prizes for application innovation, but their scores were not available at the time of writing.

After four years of development, the ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge has become the largest event of its kind. The number of participating teams this year rose to 152, a growth rate of 85 percent compared with 82 teams last year. The number of overseas universities reached 47, an increase of 135 percent over the previous year. The ASC15 event also featured an HPC workshop, held Thursday afternoon, focused on the most relevant supercomputing applications for Asia, many of which rely on the same codes used in the competition.

Stay tuned for more coverage from this exciting event.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, code-named Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from its predecessors, including the red-hot H100 and A100 GPUs. Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. While Nvidia may not spring to mind when thinking of the quant Read more…

2024 Winter Classic: Meet the HPE Mentors

March 18, 2024

The latest installment of the 2024 Winter Classic Studio Update Show features our interview with the HPE mentor team who introduced our student teams to the joys (and potential sorrows) of the HPL (LINPACK) and accompany Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the field was normalized for boys in 1969 when the Apollo 11 missi Read more…

Apple Buys DarwinAI Deepening its AI Push According to Report

March 14, 2024

Apple has purchased Canadian AI startup DarwinAI according to a Bloomberg report today. Apparently the deal was done early this year but still hasn’t been publicly announced according to the report. Apple is preparing Read more…

Survey of Rapid Training Methods for Neural Networks

March 14, 2024

Artificial neural networks are computing systems with interconnected layers that process and learn from data. During training, neural networks utilize optimization algorithms to iteratively refine their parameters until Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, code-named Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the fi Read more…

Survey of Rapid Training Methods for Neural Networks

March 14, 2024

Artificial neural networks are computing systems with interconnected layers that process and learn from data. During training, neural networks utilize optimizat Read more…

PASQAL Issues Roadmap to 10,000 Qubits in 2026 and Fault Tolerance in 2028

March 13, 2024

Paris-based PASQAL, a developer of neutral atom-based quantum computers, yesterday issued a roadmap for delivering systems with 10,000 physical qubits in 2026 a Read more…

India Is an AI Powerhouse Waiting to Happen, but Challenges Await

March 12, 2024

The Indian government is pushing full speed ahead to make the country an attractive technology base, especially in the hot fields of AI and semiconductors, but Read more…

Charles Tahan Exits National Quantum Coordination Office

March 12, 2024

(March 1, 2024) My first official day at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was June 15, 2020, during the depths of the COVID-19 loc Read more…

AI Bias In the Spotlight On International Women’s Day

March 11, 2024

What impact does AI bias have on women and girls? What can people do to increase female participation in the AI field? These are some of the questions the tech Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Analyst Panel Says Take the Quantum Computing Plunge Now…

November 27, 2023

Should you start exploring quantum computing? Yes, said a panel of analysts convened at Tabor Communications HPC and AI on Wall Street conference earlier this y Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Training of 1-Trillion Parameter Scientific AI Begins

November 13, 2023

A US national lab has started training a massive AI brain that could ultimately become the must-have computing resource for scientific researchers. Argonne N Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire