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

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

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

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

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

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.