The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC16) Training started in Beijing on January 26. Nearly 200 students and their advisors flew in for this two-day program. A total of 175 teams from six continents registered for ASC16, the world’s largest supercomputing hackathon.
To bring in the latest technology trends, ASC16 invited experts from not only big organizations like Intel and Inspur, scientific institutes like HPC (High Performance Computing) Advisory Council and the First Institute of Oceanography, but also a tech company IFLYTEK that is known for their voice recognition innovations. “I got to hear actual supercomputing applications”, says Shuo Lyu, a sophomore from Huaiyin Normal University, “It’s exciting to know you can use what you learn in real life. So glad I came.”
The teams were surprised to find the training covers much more than just the contest topics. The program includes cluster setup and review, network selection and optimization, MIC (Many-Integrated-Core) application optimization, many-core computing technology optimization development, an ocean model MASNUM-WAM, and a deep learning algorithm DNN (Deep Neural Network). Liu Tong, one of the lecturers says, “We want to equip students with the HPC skill set rather than simply prepare them for the contest. At the end of the day, our goal is to build a talent pipeline for HPC.”
In regards of the forthcoming hackathon, the team from Tsinghua University shared how they collected top prizes from all three world’s largest supercomputer contests, ASC15, ISC15, and SC15. Now with their winning secret revealed, and more world renown universities participating, the competition is turning white hot. We couldn’t help but wonder who will steal the crown in the final round in three months.
This is the second year ASC offers complimentary training for students. ASC provides supercomputing systems for free so the participating teams don’t have to worry about finding sponsors. Moreover, they would have the chance to visit supercomputing clusters in a supercomputing center. The program has become increasingly popular. In 2015, about 80 students attended the training. The number nearly tripled in 2016.