IT students from SPbU at Asian Supercomputer Challenge
SPbU’s students have successfully passed a preliminary contest for the world’s largest supercomputing hackathon Asian Supercomputer Challenge (ASC). This year, our team is the only team from Russia that has passed the national preliminary contest.
Each year, more and more student are willing to submit application proposals for ASC: last year, there were 230 participants, while this year our students are among the best 20 teams from over 300 national teams worldwide. At the final round that is to be held in May 5-9 in Nanchang, China, SPbU students will compete with the students from China, Thailand, USA, Germany, and Hungary.
ASC is the world’s largest supercomputing hackathon. ASC serves to challenge and inspire the next generation of HPC scientists and engineers to deliver innovative solutions. Closely following the most cutting-edge technologies, ASC has attracted a growing number of new talent to supercomputing and has greatly promoted communications in the HPC community throughout the world.
Among the tasks the students traditionally have to solve at the preliminary contest is to describe how to assemble the server from the components, justify why you have chosen them, and test the performance of the computer systems by using LINPACK and HPCG benchmarks. This task has become traditional for the competition, with a few variations each year, and is intended to test the general competences in High Performance Computing. Other tasks are more related to the cutting-edge technologies. This year, they were related to speeding up RELION that is used to create and process 3D-images from cryo-electron microscope. The students had to modify the code to make the application work with greater efficiency, to speed up the picture output, and build macro-molecular 3D-structures by using graphics processing units. Besides, the students had to create and teach the artificial intelligence that could respond to web search queries by using CNTK and MS MARCO, that were based on the real-life web search queries.
At the final round, the contestants should work with the CFL3D that has been developed by NASA since 1980s to solve the Navier-Stokes equation on various grids and Mystery Application that is an unknown application to work with during one day only.
The SPbU team consists of undergraduate and graduate students in Applied Mathematics and Control Processes:
Aleksei Belezeko, 2-year graduate student
Anton Gavrikov, 3-year undergraduate student
Ruslan Kuchumov, 2-year graduate student
Vadim Petrunin, 4-year undergraduate student
Svetlana Sveshnikova, 2-year graduate student (the leader of the team)
The couch is Ivan Gankevich, lecturer at the Dwpartment of Computer Modelling and Multi-Processor Systems.
In 2017, the SPbU team achieved the final round and got the First Class Prize and Best Popularity Prize.