ASC19 Announced the Top 20 Finalists

BEIJING, March 26, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Asia Supercomputer Community recently announced the top 20 finalists of the ASC19 Student Supercomputer Competition which is to be held  in Dalian University of Technology from April 21 to 25. The final competitors are selected from a wide range of universities from all around the globe including Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, University of Warsaw, Warsaw University of Technology, and Universidad EAFIT. Each competitor team will design and build supercomputers with a 3000W power limit to tackle tough AI-application tasks like single-image super-resolution (SR), Community Earth System Model (CESM), sequence assembly software WTDBG, and high-performance benchmarks like HPL & HPCG.

300+ teams from all over the world participated in ASC19 preliminary competition, but only 20 teams have advanced to finals. Beihang University lead the finalist with an outstanding performance in the single-image super-resolution (SR) task. After evaluating multiple models, this team built a seamless deep learning model and attained a perfect score with 2.58 Perceptual Index.

The Peking University team achieved the highest score in the Community Earth System Model (CESM) task through an in-depth performance assessment of the computing problem involving serial code functional optimizations in CPU cycles, and parallel finite-volume meta-framework workflow in GPUs.

Seven of the participating teams will be competing in the finals for the first time: Southern University of Science and Technology, Jinan University, Peking University, Shanxi University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, University of Tartu and Sungkyunkwan University. These teams were inspired to succeed from the results of past ASC competitions in attracting new talents from universities around the world for studies in supercomputing. These first-time finalists have taken this ASC student supercomputer challenge to the next level.

The ASC19 finals will include several cutting-edge applications in the HPC and AI fields. The AI image super-resolution SR challenge will require from the teams to reconstruct high-resolution face images from low-resolution images far below face recognition standards. The team winning the highest score in the Community Earth System Model (CESM) task will be awarded the e-Prize. CESM is the most widely used climate model in the world and one of the main climate models adapted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to prepare its fifth and sixth assessment reports. An additional challenge will involve WTDGB, a genome assembly tool for third-generation sequencing developed by Chinese scientists.

In aiming to promote collaboration and exchange between the participating teams, the ASC19 finals will introduce for the first time the Group Competition. The top 20 teams will form 5 groups through an on-site draw and tackle a super challenge application by leveraging on cross-team cooperation. A separate award and bonus will be provided to the winners of the Group Competition.

The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge is the world's largest student supercomputer hackathon, sponsored and organized by China and supported by many Asian, European, and American institutions and world renown experts. The main objectives of ASC are to encourage the exchange and training of young supercomputer talents from different countries, improve R&D of supercomputer applications, boost the development of supercomputing, and promote technical and industrial innovation. The first ASC Supercomputer Challenge was held in 2012 and has since attracted over 7,000 undergraduates from all over the world. ASC19 is jointly organized by Asia Supercomputer Community, Inspur Group and Dalian University of Technology.

The 20 ASC19 finalists are:

• Beihang University
• Southern University of Science and Technology
• Fuzhou University
• Jinan University
• Shanghai Jiao Tong University
• Sun Yat-Sen University
• National Tsing Hua University
• Peking University
• Huazhong University of Science and Technology
• Shanxi University
• Taiyuan University of Technology
• University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
• The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• University of Warsaw / Warsaw University of Technology
• Tsinghua University
• Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
• Dalian University of Technology
• University of Tartu
• Universidad EAFIT
• Sungkyunkwan University

SOURCE Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co., Ltd