Tsinghua University Crowned Champions of 2015 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge

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May 26, 2015, 10:07 ET

BEIJING, May 26, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- On May 22, the final round of the 2015 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC15), the largest supercomputer contest in the world, ended at Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan city, Shanxi province, China.

Tsinghua University was the winner, National University of Defense Technology came second, Nanyang Technological University from Singapore scored highest on LINPACK, and Sun Yat-sen University obtained the e Prize Award. Application Innovation Awards were taken by Tsinghua University, National University of Defense Technology, National Tsinghua University and Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Best Presentation went to Taiyuan University of Technology.

ASC15 was co-organized by Asia Supercomputer Community, Inspur Group and Taiyuan University of Technology. A total of 152 teams from 135 universities from six different continents registered, an increase of 85% compared to ASC14 with the number of overseas universities reaching 47, up 135% on that of last year. After tough competition in the preliminary round, 16 teams worldwide qualified for the finals, which were held from May 18-22.

At the closing ceremony, Prof. Mo Zeyao, chairman of the evaluation committee, delivered a speech about the competition and suggested that as a group, the performance of all the participating teams this year was better than ever before. He added that many universities around the world were highly skilled when it came to supercomputing application innovation.

Indeed so talented were the Tsinghua University team, they scored highly on all seven questions, gaining a clear overall majority, while Nanyang Technological University from Singapore impressed with their performance on LINPACK, 11.92 Tflop/s and even broke the world record under 3000W power budget.

The most eye-catching e Prize adopted the SKA (square kilometer array telescope) data processing application Gridding. e Prize Winner Sun Yat-sen University successfully optimized the codes and correctly computed all the three workloads, which increased the original application 600 times and decreased to 1/20 of the previous system energy consumption. This accomplishment provided SKA -- the largest international astronomy cooperation project in the world -- with outstanding and efficient supercomputer designing suggestions.

Mr. Wang Endong, the initiator of ASC and chief scientist at Inspur Group, believes that supercomputers are currently closing the gap in relation to many other fields, such as science and technology, economics and culture. As a result, the supercomputer will become the key technology after the Internet, influencing all aspects of society and ASC will give a strong impetus to supercomputing application development and talent cultivation not only in China but also for the rest of the world.

Prof. Lv Ming, the president of Taiyuan University of Technology, thinks that ASC15 has encouraged more and more college students to learn, understand and love the cutting-edge technology of supercomputers and will significantly boost interdisplinary academic study and talent cultivation in universities, sparking creativity and innovation in students.

The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge, which began and is organized in China and supported by relative experts and institutes in Asian, European and American countries, aims to promote the communication and cultivation of supercomputing talent in various regions and countries. Its goals also include advancing the application and developing ability of supercomputing, driving the scientific and technological force of supercomputers, and promoting scientific and industrial innovation. In just four years, ASC has become the world's largest supercomputer contest.