DENVER, Colo., Dec. 2, 2019 — The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge 2020 (ASC20) held its first briefing session at SC19, and announced its timeline for the new round. Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China was selected as the host of the ASC20 Finals.

ASC20 will continue with the format of the preliminaries and finals. There will be three stages: registration, preliminaries, and finals. During the registration stage, the colleges and universities can organize their participating teams and register for the competition. All colleges and universities intending to participate in the competition will apply to the organizing committee through the competition official website before January 5, 2020. A college or university may have multiple teams, where each team includes one advisor and five undergraduates. During the preliminary stage from January 6 to February 28, the participating teams will submit their program proposals for the preliminary tasks designated by the organizing committee. After evaluation by the judging committee and preliminary jury, the 20 winning teams will enter the finals on April 25-29, 2020 and compete for various awards including the Champion, Silver Prize, the Highest LINPACK, and the e Prize.

The ASC20 Finals will be held at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen, China, which is a pilot-experimenting university for the Chinese higher education reform. Based on the discipline settings and operation models from world-class science and technology universities, SUSTech is focused on science, engineering, medicine, and has disciplines also in business, humanity and social sciences. SUSTech has participated in the ASC competition many times, was ranked second in the preliminary, and reached the ASC19 finals.

“Shenzhen is one of the most open-minded cities in China,” said Wang Lianping, Director of the SUSTech Supercomputing Center. “SUSTech will uphold this tradition and host ASC, the world’s most prominent and largest supercomputing competition. Together, we will create an open and innovative international competition that allows young people with a passion for supercomputing around the world to communicate, encourage, on another, and to grow together while promoting the cultivation of high-level supercomputing talents worldwide.”

In ASC19, more than 300 teams around the world signed up to participate, and 20 teams progressed to the final after the preliminary. In the finals, the top 20 teams designed and built supercomputing clusters under the power consumption limit of 3,000 W and ran internationally recognized benchmark tests. They were also required to run optimized tasks for scientific engineering calculations and artificial intelligence. Students in the “teamed-up” drawing for the Group Competition was used for the first time in the student cluster competitions at SC, ISC and ASC, and aims to promote cooperation and cross-cultural communication.

About ASC

The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge is the world’s largest student supercomputer competition, sponsored and organized by Asia Supercomputer Community in China and supported by Asian, European, and American experts and institutions. The main objectives of ASC are to encourage exchange and training of young supercomputing talent from different countries, improve supercomputing applications and R&D capacity, boost the development of supercomputing, and promote technical and industrial innovation. The annual ASC Supercomputer Challenge was first held in 2012 and has since attracted over 7,000 undergraduates from all over the world. Learn more ASC at https://www.asc-events.org/.

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Source: ASC