STUDENT TEAM WON THE ASC SUPERCOMPUTER CHALLENGE
A team of students from the Department of Computer Science recently won the championship in the ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge.
More than 300 teams competed in the event, and the results were announced just as NTHU was about to celebrate its 108th anniversary and the 63rd anniversary of its re-establishment in Taiwan, greatly adding to the festive atmosphere.
Organized by the Asia Supercomputer Community (ASC), the ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge is the largest such event in the world, the next two largest being the SCC held in the US and the ISC held in Germany. This year's competition was held at the Dalian University of Technology in China. Last year the team from Tsinghua University in Beijing won all three competitions, but was the runner-up in this year's ASC competition.
The team's advisor was Prof. Jerry Chou of the Department of Computer Science, who for many years has been training students to participate in similar competitions. Under his guidance in the SCC competition the NTHU team won the overall prize in 2010 and 2011, and won the Highest LINPACK award in 2007, 2008, and 2014; and at the 2013 ASC competition the NTHU team was the runner up.
Chou said that some of the team members gained valuable experience by participating in last year's US competition, and that this was a major factor in their outstanding performance, along with their high level of coordination which enabled them to overcome obstacles quickly.
The NTHU team consisted of five juniors and seniors of the Department of Computer Science. With Chen Hunghsin as the captain and Hsu Kengjui, Lin Yuanching, Lin Shaofu and Yang Chichen as members and two students, Yu Liyu and Wang Yuzheng, served as coaches. Captain Chen said that ever 20 hours every week preparing for the competition, and that's what enabled them to perform so well in the competition.
In recent years the ASC competition has been giving increasing importance to artificial intelligence. Yang Chichen—the only female team member—led the team in the artificial intelligence face recognition segment of the competition, in which they converted a low-resolution image into a high resolution image. She said that she used to be rather undisciplined, but the pressure of preparing for the competition impelled her to greatly improve her computer skills, adding that she is especially grateful for Prof. Chou's encouragement and guidance.
Prof. Chou gave a special word of thanks to Quanta Cloud Technology and Quanta Computers for providing travel funds and computer equipment over the years, and to the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) for providing software technology. He also said that he is looking forward to seeing a new generation of talented programmers in Taiwan to participate in the development of high-performance computing.
In this year's competition each of the 20 finalist team was asked to set up supercomputer platform and then using it to solve seven optimization problems relating to highperformance computing and artificial intelligence, such as modeling global climate change, without exceeding a runtime power consumption of 3,000W.
In announcing the results the judges said that the NTHU team demonstrated a comprehensive and profound understanding of supercomputing, which they were able to apply with flawless precision.
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The NTHU team receiving the championship trophy
at the 2019 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge. | The NTHU team at work in the finals. |