China’s NUDT (National University of Defense Technology) was the first Chinese team to compete at a Student Cluster Competition when they made the trek to SC10 in Seattle. They came very close to winning the whole competition, finishing a very close second to Taiwan’s Tsinghua University. They survived a grueling intra-China playoff round to lock down their ticket to the ISC 2012 Student Cluster Competition in Hamburg.
NUDT (profile here)knows from GPUs. First, their university is the host institution for China’s Tianhe-1A, the 2.56 Petaflop GPU-heavy system that ruled the supercomputing world in 2010. Several of the students on their Seattle and Hamburg teams have had hands-on experience with Tianhe-1A — pretty good training for modifying code to run on GPUs and hybrid systems.
True to form, NUDT has brought a GPU-CPU hybrid system to the Hamburg competition. As they tell me in this short video clip, GPUs in hybrid systems have become their trademark. Will the power of the GPU vault them over other competitors into the top spot this year? We’ll know soon.
Posted In: Latest News, ISC 2012 Hamburg
Tagged: Student Cluster Competition, National University of Defense Technology, NUDT, GPU, ISC 2012, CPU, Meet the teams