Tsinghua University topped their 19 competitors to take home the Overall Championship trophy at the recent ASC17 Student Cluster Competition in Wuxi, China. Continue reading
ASC17: Coach’s Corner; Here’s why we do this
As these ASC17 articles started to hit The Register, a couple of comments indicated that some readers might be missing the point of these student cluster competitions:
“So the newcomers won because they had two more NVIDIA GPUs installed. Who would have thought?”
“Gosh, I wonder how they can do better next year?”
“….the competition would be mostly about deferring your purchasing decisions until the last minute (to get the shiniest new things in your box), so what’s the point?” Continue reading
ASC17: Down to the Wire; Action and drama mark final day
As a cluster competition starts to wind down and deadlines are close, I like to do a video check in with the teams to see how they’re doing. Usually they’re either very relaxed or very nervous.
The relaxed ones either know where they stand and whether they’re in or out of the competition for first place or one of the other prizes. The nervous ones aren’t sure exactly where they are in terms of the other teams and they’re anxious to get one more application run in before the final horn.
Keep this in mind as you view the following videos. For the most part, they’re just a minute or two per team, but they’re very instructive as to how the team feels about their chances. Continue reading
ASC17: Record Number of Conjugates Gradiented; New high on HPC benchmark
Yet another record has fallen at the ASC17 Student Cluster Competition. This time, it’s the HPCG (Conjugate Gradient) mark. Little known Weifang University, who also set a new student LINPACK record, notched a score of 992.333 GFLOP/s, handily topping the rest of the field. Continue reading
ASC17: Up Close and Personal; Meet the teams, ogle the racks
With 20 university teams, ASC17 is the largest student cluster competition in the world. So it’s only natural that this story, which will give you a chance to meet the teams via video, will be the longest student cluster competition story in history.
In the videos, we’re talking to the kids on the first day of the competition. You’ll see essentially three separate moods in the videos:
- Giddy optimism: everything is still possible, and the road to victory is ahead of them.
- Guarded optimism: they’ve seen enough to know that this competition is really tough, and they’re now a bit more wary. Still optimistic, but they know it’s going to be a slog to cross the finish line.
- Depression/resignation: the team has seen some problems and knows that they’ve fallen behind. While they still might be able to catch up, reality is sinking in, and they’re starting to become philosophical about the experience.
ASC17: New Student LINPACK Record; 31.7 Trillion flop/s – pretty sporty
Another world record has fallen. Asian Student Cluster competitors have broken the student LINPACK record with an amazing score of 31.7 TF/s. This barely tops the former record of 31.15 TF/s set at SC16 by the University of Science & Technology of China. Continue reading
ASC17: Massive turnout, small racks, and large GPUs
More than 230 university teams vied for only 20 slots in the 2017 Asian Student Cluster Competition (ASC) finals being held this week in Wuxi, China. At 20 teams, this is the largest cluster competition the world has ever seen. Really, it is. Continue reading
ASC17: Teams battle one another – and the world’s fastest supercomputer
This year’s edition of the Asian Student Cluster Competition (ASC) is the largest competition of its kind in the world, with 20 teams of university undergrads battling each other, themselves, and the world’s fastest supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight, to win the Asian Cluster Crown*. Continue reading
SC16 Competitors Find New Challenge: Space Pirates
There was some time for fun at the recently concluded SC16 Student Cluster Competition. Fortunately for us, right next to where the competition was held stood the SUSE booth, which was equipped with a great VR “space pirate” shooter. This, of course, captured our students’ attention – particularly one from Team Munich.
He went ahead and organized a challenge between the teams: one representative for each team will battle the pirates to the death. Even better, he worked with SUSE to get a time when the teams could compete head-to-head. Continue reading
SC16: Kids Conjugate Gradients for Science and Glory
Student teams at SC16 were faced with a new(ish) benchmark during their 48-hour marathon run for the Student Cluster Competition Cup (there is no actual cup). The teams have always run the HPL (LINPACK) program, which is used to rank the TOP500 supercomputers in the world. But this year, they’re also running the “book-end” HPCG (High Performance Conjugate Gradient) benchmark. Continue reading