Inspur Supports Tsinghua and HUST Teams in Upcoming ISC'13

BEIJING, June 6, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- On June 16, the Student Cluster Challenge of International Supercomputing Conference 2013 (ISC'13) will begin in Leipzig, Germany. Two teams from China will compete with seven other teams from the U.S., Germany, U.K. and other countries in the area of supercomputing applications for four days for the annual championship. The two teams are Tsinghua University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST). They will be sponsored by Inspur Group for the entire process, as the representative teams from the Asia Supercomputer Challenge (asc-events.org).

With a 28 year history, ISC will greet the participation of 160-plus IT companies from more than 50 countries this year. As the annual event and trend indicator of the supercomputing industry, the conference covers academic exchange, product and technology exhibition, Student Cluster Challenge, and many other activities, among which, the challenging and innovative Student Cluster Challenge will highlight ISC'13.

Each team is required to structure its own supercomputer with a total power budget of 3kW, on which five computing applications will be optimized and tested. The team scoring the highest aggregate points will be the overall winner of the competition. Except two secret applications, there are three benchmarks to be run for the competition, namely, GROMACS, MILC and WRF, which are typical software in HPC application and are suitable for testing the hands-on capabilities of young supercomputing talents. With world-renowned supercomputing experts included in the judge panel, ISC enjoys high credibility, and is known as one of the top three world supercomputing competitions, alongside the SC from the U.S. and the Asia Student Supercomputer Challenge from China.

The nine teams in the competition are considered to be elite. Purdue University, of the U.S., is one of the top engineering schools in the world, boasting the supercomputers with the highest performance in any U.S. university, and has participated in U.S. SC student competitions five times -- gaining extensive experience. With a long history and being the No. 1 computer department in Germany, the host country, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology won the "Fan Favorite" award in ISC'12. Tsinghua University of China was the champion of both ISC'12 and ASC'13, and its 7579Gflops score in ASC'13 this April has doubled the world record in the HPL test related
segment. Huazhong University of Science and Technology of China demonstrated its mastery of cutting-edge technologies in ASC'13, and made the world marvel at its speed-up ratio of 60,000 after computing optimization based on MIC Architecture. Moreover, University of Colorado of the U.S., Chemnitz University of Technology of Germany, University of Edinburgh of the U.K., Centre for High Performance Computing of South Africa, and Costa Rica Institute of Technology of Latin America also participated in past competitions.

To help Chinese teams achieve best results in ISC'13, Inspur Group invited relevant personnel of the HPC Advisory Council, an organizer of ISC'13, to further discuss important issues in competition rules with the teams, and also invited experts to explain and share experience in terms of system platform model selection, hardware platform optimization, application algorithm optimization, acceleration tools and skills, rational utilization of rules and competition strategy determination.

As a leading supplier of integrated commercial computing solutions in China, Inspur participated in the development of two petaflop supercomputing systems, Tianhe 1A and Sunway BlueLight MPP, and accumulated extensive experience in HPC applications, as well as heterogeneous architecture innovation and business exploration of CPU-GPU and CPU-MIC heterogeneous architecture. During ISC'13, Inspur will also sponsor the HPC Connection Workshop, an international supercomputing communication platform, by inviting world-renowned supercomputing experts from Japan, the U.K., South Korea, China and other countries to have an all-round exchange and sharing regarding the current situation and development trend of the supercomputer industry.

Known as the "brain of modern science and technology", the supercomputer is the scientific innovation infrastructure of many different countries. As stated by Wang Endong, Senior Vice President of Inspur Group, the insufficient number of applications and talent shortages are the major problems restricting supercomputer development in the world. As an initiative, Inspur organizes the Asia Student Supercomputer Challenge and sponsors ISC student teams to motivate and educate supercomputing talents, promote international communication and improve application, and aims to fundamentally advance the development of the supercomputing industry in China and in the world.

SOURCE Inspur Group