Recently, the Asia Supercomputer Community announced the 2015 ASC student supercomputer challenge (ASC15) the finalists list. This list is a kind of afford food for thought. The teams from Asia obtained 13 tickets, among which China won 11. Coincidentally, at last year’s ASC14, China universities also won 10 places.

What’s more, the ASC championship in history all swept by the China Universities, including the Tsinghua University won the ASC12 and ASC13 two championship, Shanghai Jiao Tong University was the champion of ASC14. Whether there will be foreign universities to break the “Curse” win the ASC15 championship this year. This is one of the biggest suspense of the ASC 15.

The dream team of China college students in the ASC student supercomputer challenge remind us another Chinese students shining international competition — the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). During the 29 years Chinese formally participated, China won a total of 19 championship, the IMO has become “Chinese game”.

The events have a remarkable coincidence, let us can’t help to wonder what factors promote the China universities to triumph those international arena?

Home court operations may be a factor cannot to be ignored. ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge is initiated by the Asian scientists, become the world’s largest university supercomputer race, so far, the host of the previous contests all in China. With the geographical advantage, China University get more finals places could be taken as reasonable.

However, Chinese Universities also worked well in ISC German and SC America supercomputing race. This seems to have home court advantage is less able to stand up. In the two races as known as ASC, Chinese universities have been recognized as the “seed” teams. According to statistics, Tsinghua University won the ISC12 championship, Huazhong University of Science and Technology won the ISC13 the highest Linpack award, National Tsinghua University won the 2 session of USA SC championship and won the SC14 Award for “the highest computing performance”.

Clearly, even in combat overseas, Chinese universities still domineering. In this regard, the Asia supercomputer community, executive director Dr. Qing (Kitty) JI shared that the good ranking of China universities in the international supercomputing races has close relationship with Chinese supercomputing’s rapid development. More Chinese universities and research institutions have been equipped with supercomputers. The wide spreading hardware give the possibility to the young students contact, understand and learn the supercomputing.

In 2014, Data shows that there are 132 Asian supercomputers listed on the top500 list, China has 76.While 10 years ago, the number of Chinese supercomputers only 19.

With the rapid development of the hardware, ASC challenge plays an important role in the college supercomputer education. This is another reason why Chinese universities domineers in the international supercomputing races. ASC always stand on the HPC application innovation and development; and encourages students to use their hands to complete the porting, parallel architecture, build supercomputing systems and advanced computing applications, performance optimization etc. the whole process makes the college students can better contact, learn and master a lot of knowledge and experiences outside the classroom.

Tsinghua University team captain Song Fangrui agreed with the above views. With ASC14, ISC14 and ASC15 three supercomputer contests experience, Song said: “the race is only two or three days, but many unexpected may occur, may encounter difficulties cannot meet during the race preparation. With this exercise we find the ability to identify the problem and stay flexible. At the same time, after the race, the global HPC lovers can stay together and discuss, from which we can learn a lot of supercomputer technologies, expand our horizons, this is an unforgettable experience for each team member.”

The unforgettable things take account of the difficult “e Prize Award” question. The question uses the current supercomputer research problems, greatly stimulated the interest of students. In the case of ASC15, for the first time this year, the international engineering science SKA (Square Kilometre Array telescope) project shares their Gridding (data processing software) as the “e Prize computing challenge” question. This means that students can try to solve the problem of “the universe” with the most knowledgeable scientists.

Note that with the ASC’s promoting, the popularity of supercomputing has been greatly increased in colleges. There are a lot of participating colleges and universities have set up the supercomputer related courses, strengthening the undergraduate supercomputer knowledge education. Taking Sun Yat-sen University as an example, the university has established a supercomputer Institute; Institute of supercomputing applications, large data Institute, and set up a supercomputer engineering software engineering technology research center ( supported by Ministry of education). The university has become the most perfect university for supercomputers.

In fact, let more and more students have the opportunity to contact and to learn the supercomputer and learn how to use it; let the supercomputer better function as “innovation engine”, are more important things than to transform ASC into another Mathematical Olympiad, are they?