Tsinghua University defends its title as the ASC18 Champion

On May 9th, the final of the ASC 2018 Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC18) was held successfully at Nanchang University, Jiangxi Province. The Tsinghua Team defended their championship by completing the highest number of tasks.

In addition to independently designing and building supercomputers up to 3000 watts, the teams entering the final round were required to run HPL/HPCG benchmark, tackle problems in AI machine reading and comprehension, along with optimizing cutting-edge scientific and engineering applications including RELION – a core application of the cryo-EM that won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and NASA’s famous computational fluid-dynamics code CFL3D.

Up till now, the Tsinghua Teams, comprised of undergraduate students from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, have been top in the Challenge five times in the past seven ASC Student Supercomputer Challenges.

ASC18 was jointly organized by the Asia Supercomputer Community, Inspur Group and Nanchang University. More than 300 teams from colleges and universities all over the world signed up for the Challenge, with 20 teams entering the final round.

The members of the Tsinghua Team are mainly third-year and fourth-year students from the Department of Computer Science and Technology. Their instructors are Zhai Jidong, Associate Professor of the Department, and Han Wentao, a postdoc.

The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge was launched in 2012. It is one of the three most influential international supercomputing competitions for university students in the world. The other two are the Student Cluster Competition (SCC), launched in the US in 2007, and the ISC-HPCAC Student Cluster Competition, initiated in Germany in 2012.

ASC aims to promote the exchange and training of young supercomputing talents in various countries and regions via competitions, enhance the application and R&D of supercomputing, drive technological advance by supercomputing, and promote technological and industrial innovation.

The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge has been held for seven consecutive years. This year, it attracted more than 5,500 university students from all over the world. It is currently the world's largest and most widely participated-in supercomputing competition for college students.

Editors: John Olbrich, Zhu Lvhe