DCST Student HPC Team triumphs in the ISC17 Student Cluster Competition

On June 21st, the ISC17 Student Cluster Competition finished in Frankfurt. The student high-performance computing (HPC) team of Tsinghua University, consisting of undergraduates from the Department of Computer Science and technology (DCST), won the championship, in addition to solving the Captcha Challenge, in which teams were required to recognize verification codes using a deep learning approach. To date,Tsinghua has won the ISC championship three times in the past six years. This year Tsinghua won both the ASC and ISC student cluster competitions.

Each team was asked to set up an HPC cluster system with a 3KW power limit. The competition goals included the benchmarks HPCC and HPCG, the partial differential equation computing platform FEniCS, the plane-wave density functional theory modeling application MiniDFT, the molecular dynamics simulator LAMMPS, and the popular deep learning framework TensorFlow.

The team entered a new preparation period after winning the ASC championship and added some new members. In the end, the DCST team won the championship on behalf of Tsinghua University. South Africa’s CHPC (centre for high performance computing) team won the second place, and Beihang University won the third place. The Tsinghua team, together with the Beihang team and NTU (Nanyang Technological University) team, correctly recognized all the testing verification codes, and shared first place in this challenge.

The ISC17 Student Cluster Competition is hosted by the HPC Advisory Council. ISC, SC and ASC Student Cluster Competitions are the world's top three prestigious international supercomputing competitions. This year, 11 teams from seven different countries came to the  ISC competition. The Tsinghua team is composed of undergraduates from DCST; its members are Ye Fangke, Li Yuxuan, Feng Guanyu, Ka Cheong Lau, Li Beichen, and Xie Lei. Wang Miao, who is an HPC veteran, served as technical supporter. The team advisors were Assistant Professor Zhai Jidong and postdoctoral researcher Han Wentao, both from the DCST.

Reference website

http://hpcadvisorycouncil.com/events/student-cluster-competition/

https://www.isc-events.com/isc17_em/