The 10th Asian Supercomputing Challenge took place last week in Hefei, China, and it was tougher than ever. Twenty-four university teams (20 onsite, 4 remote) competed over his five days to see which team could optimize benchmarks of his real HPC/AI application and the system they constructed themselves. The only limit for the student team was his 3,000 watt power limit that could not be exceeded while the application was running.
The ASC competition is the most demanding student team competition in the world today. why? It’s an application. The ASC suite of apps and the pressure of screening interviews is always a daunting adventure for students, and this year is no different. Here’s what the students had to work on at ASC23:
benchmark: HPL and HPCG are staples of every student cluster competition. These are the first applications of the formal competition and serve as a relatively easy first step towards more demanding tasks ahead. All teams in ASC23 submitted both HPL and HPCG scores, which is commendable.
YLLM: This is a large language model and several teams thought it might be the most difficult task in the competition. Teams are asked to build a language model from a 100 GB dataset provided by the organizer. However, there are pitfalls. We need to build two models, one generating 1,157 million tokens and the other generating 17,888 million tokens.
Deep MD: Add AI analysis to molecular dynamics models such as those generated by LAAMPS and GROMACS (and others). This greatly increases the efficiency of molecular modeling. Students were tasked with modeling water, copper, and other cases. DeepMD won the Gordon Bell Award for his SC20 in 2020 and is widely used in the HPC world. The following interview with Linfeng Zhang, DP Technology’s chief researcher and chairman, delves deeper into DeepMD.
WRF Hydro: If you want to predict floods, snow cover, rainfall, and anything else related to water and the earth, you need WRF-Hydro. It’s open source, extensible, and can model anything related to water and weather. What more could you want? Judging by the results of ASC23, this is also a difficult application to execute and optimize. Most of the teams were able to make it, with a best score of around 7 points (out of a maximum of 18) but a median score of just 2.79. Painful app for student teams.
Mystery Application – FVCOM: is designed to analyze and model coastal ocean water circulation, as well as other factors such as salinity. Mystery applications in cluster contests are always wild cards. These could be well-known applications with lots of documentation, or arcane code that students would have a hard time compiling and optimizing. FVCOM fell in the middle, but still proved to be a difficult task, much to the disappointment of the students. The average score for this application was just 2.14 points out of a maximum of 18, making it the lowest scoring application in the entire competition.
Group Challenge: To mix things up and get students to work together, the organizers designed group assignments that randomized teams of members from each university and were tasked with tackling a quantum simulation challenge. Although the results of the group challenge were not reflected in the overall result, he was awarded a cash prize of 20,000 CNY (approximately US$2,800) to the winning student. After all, this was a rather diabolical challenge. To learn more about this, we interviewed Pan Feng of the Shanghai Research Institute, a branch of the University of Science and Technology of China, and the designer of this task.
Judges interview: In this final assignment, students must face a room full of HPC experts and give a presentation covering their competitive experience. This includes their efforts and results for any contest submissions. It’s a lot of pressure for students, but it plays an important role in seeing how much they learned during the event. To gain a deeper understanding of the review process, we interviewed Mr. Guan Yongqiang, Honorary Senior Associate Fellow of the University of Hong Kong, who served as an ASC judge for many years. This was followed by a fun conversation about the student cluster competition and his experience over 40 years in HPC. I really enjoyed the lively and wide-ranging conversation.
In our next on-site coverage, we will give you the chance to meet the team through the miracle of video. stay tuned….
