Since invitation for global registration, ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge 2016 (ASC16) has received applications from universities around the world, including the overall champion of Tsinghua University in ASC, ISC and SC, Purdue University and other world-renowned universities.

Growing sharply from 27 colleges and universities in 2012 to 135 ones and 152 teams and from a regional activity to a worldwide event covering five continents, ASC has become the world’s largest and most extensive world-class supercomputing contest. What is the secret underneath? Listen to what the teams that participated in the competition have to say.

Participation Matters

ASC challenge has attained increasing interests and support from universities, scientific institutions and supercomputing experts across the globe. With its growing scale and coverage, it has become the world’s largest supercomputer challenge for university students, ranked among the world’s three largest supercomputing challenge together with SC in USA and ISC in Germany. ASC has attracted more and more students with its heavy focus on frontline sciences, high-end systems, applications and practices. Students’ enthusiasm about innovations and creative achievements have brought remarkable inspirations and have massively promoted supercomputing applications.

Alexander Lazarev is the advisor of the team from St Petersburg University. They successfully made the Top10 of ASC13. He says that experience is more important than results. Their team was the only one in the finals that used CPU+MIC as the computing platform. Unlike other supercomputing contests, ASC provides specific MIC optimization topics and professional training. Alexander Lazarev says that although they did not win the award, they have learned a lot about MIC optimization.

Fan Yang, a runner-up team member in ASC12, was a “rookie” before participating in ASC for the first time, and merely knew supercomputing as a scale computing with multiple computers connected. In nearly half a year for ASC12, she got a deep understanding on system architecture, network architecture, system environment and parallel computing mode of supercomputer, personally experienced cluster building and configuration, parallel program preparation and optimization and others. After the contest, he became one of the few students qualified for studying abroad with his top grades and received admission from five world-renowned universities including University of Chicago, The Australian National University and Edinburgh University.

Experience on the Fastest Computer

For students who hardly have access to supercomputers during their university study, ASC contest is appealing in that it provides access to massive supercomputing platform. For example, Tianhe-2, the world’s fastest supercomputer, was used in ASC, which, for all participants, could be a one-time-only chance in their life.

Purdue University, the ASC14 Top 16 team, had the luck to use this world’s fastest supercomputer. Before going to China for ASC14, the university published an article about ASC contest, saying that all team members were immensely interested and anticipated to enrich their knowledge in supercomputer.

Beyond Education

The values of ASC contest are not only to improve students’ supercomputing skills but also to advance education structure. Before participating in ASC, the supercomputing at Tsinghua University was mainly aim at graduate students. But after several ASC participations, it begins to lay much importance to the development of supercomputing talents in university study and eventually collected prizes from all world’s three largest contests, ASC15, ISC15 and SC15.

Jidong Zhai, the advisor of the team of Tsinghua University, admitted that the winning of overall champion in ASC15, ISC15 and SC15 was directly related to never-absent participation in ASC. By virtue of practice in ASC for four times, Tsinghua University team members all develop in-depth understanding to the construction and optimization of heterogeneous environment, understanding and optimization in questions in multi-disciplined applications and screening and optimization in serial and parallel instructions.

Telkom University from Indonesia had a similar experience. Telkom University registered for ASC15 and also for ASC16 this year. As a member of Telkom University team for ASC16, Indra wibisono said Indonesia currently had huge demand for supercomputing and more so for the talent. He thinks ASC and its provided supercomputer equipment are a valuable opportunity for anyone who is eager to learn more about supercomputing.

Supercomputers are widely used in various industries like deep learning, earth simulation, space research, molecular modeling, drug development, quantum mechanics, oil exploration, weather forecasting, and financial computing. Professionals are becoming an urgent demand in this area. ASC is anticipated to meet this demand by attracting and incubating more talent for supercomputing.