At 11:30 am local time on Wednesday in Wuhan, China, Zhejiang University was declared the winner of the High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark portion of the Asia Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC16). The Zhejiang University team achieved a record-setting 12.03 teraflops without going over the competition’s 3000 watt power limit, beating the previous record of 11.92 teraflops set by Nanyang Technological University at ASC15. Power readings were taken every second to ensure the integrity of the results.
Teams who build a system with the intent to win the LINPACK usually are not the overall winner, but Team Zhejiang is confident it can buck this trend due to their cluster design – four Inspur server nodes equipped dual socket Xeons and two GPU K80 GPU cards each – and their software optimizations. Fresh from their LINPACK win, the team was in good spirits and were already hard at work on the next round of performance testing.
While Team Zhejiang entered the competition aiming to sweep multiple categories, many teams forego LINPACK aspirations to focus on achieving the highest overall performance across the full spectrum of contest applications, which in addition to HPL, include the HPCG benchmark, a surface wave numerical model MASNUM, a material simulation software ABINIT, a deep learning algorithm DNN, and a mystery application.
Winning both LINPACK and the overall award is not easily accomplished because of different stress patterns. So far only one team in the history of student cluster competitions has pulled it off. At ASC13 in Shanghai, Tsinghua University set a new contest record of 7.579 teraflops, doubling the previous best, and was also crowned the overall champion.
In second place on the LINPACK application test was Hong Kong Baptist University with an impressive 10.3 teraflops. Third place went to Nanyang Technological University with 10.03 teraflops.