ASC14 three teams with broken HPL computing performance world record

April 23, 3721.html "> 2014 ASC World University Supercomputer Contest (ASC14) first-round HPL competition that hit a staggering success, Sun Yat-sen University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology And Taiwan's Tsinghua University team of three universities all broke the world record, in which the host Sun Yat-sen under the constraint of 3000W power consumption to achieve 9.272 trillion floating-point operations per second performance, ahead of the competition to lock the highest computing performance award.

Sponsored by Asia Supercomputing Association, Sun Yat-sen University and Inspur Group, ASC14 is the largest supercomputer contest in the world sponsored by Asia. Globalization, high standards and Chinese characteristics are the three major characteristics of this contest. The competition aims to promote the exchange and cultivation of super-young talents among all countries and regions through the platform of competition so as to enhance the level of supercomputer application and research and development capability, exert super-scientific and technological driving forces and promote innovation in science and technology and industry. ASC14 started in November 2013, a total of 82 college teams from five continents enrolled. After intense preliminaries competition, the final 16 colleges and universities finalists April 21 -25 at the Zhongshan University held the finals.

It is understood that, ASC14 HPL test strict competition rules, requiring the participating teams in the total power consumption of 3000W restrictions, the use of the organizing committee to provide Inspur super nodes, high-speed network and other equipment to complete the super-system construction. Sun Yat-sen University eventually completed the supercomputer system uses a hybrid heterogeneous acceleration technology, using a total of 216 processor core Inspur super server and 8 heterogeneous accelerator card. After the international HPL test, the system eventually sustained floating-point computing capacity reached 9.272 trillion times / sec. Earlier, the world record was 8.45 teraflops and was created by the Huazhong University of Science and Technology during the ISC13 Supercomputing Contest in Germany in June 2013.

Sun Yat-sen's team adviser Ye Wei said that the reason why Sun Yat-sen can achieve this result is that the team conducted a lot of thorough and meticulous strategic optimization for HPL applications on the one hand, On the other hand, the organizer provided the Cluster Engine, which is a visual high-performance computing service platform for each participating team, which can monitor the running status of the system in real time and help the team to analyze and optimize Operating power consumption, in the performance of computing while effectively controlling the power consumption in less than 3000W. In his opinion, HPL only represents the theoretical calculation of the system performance, the next practical application of the optimization test will be a greater challenge.

At a small press conference later in the day, Liu Jun, member of the ASC competition organizing committee and Inspur Chaozhou high-performance computing general manager, said that the three teams were surprised and delighted with breaking the world record, indicating that ASC students' The understanding of new technologies, super innovative architecture thinking, are far more than the previous, a good reflection of the high level of competition features. At the same time, it also shows that ASC Competition has played a significant role in promoting super-talent training. Liu Jun said that the next team will also respond to Tianhe two application of the expansion of the ultimate challenge, more worth the wait.

According to reports, ASC supercomputing competition has been held for three consecutive sessions, from 27 in 2012 to 43 in 2013, and then to the 2014 global 82 colleges and universities participating, completed from China to Asia, from Asia to the world "Three jumps" development. In the three years since the contest was held, it has aroused the concern of all sectors of society over the development of supercomputer applications and attracted more and more talents to devote themselves to supercomputer businesses. This has a profound impact on the development of supercomputer industries.

Professor Xu Yuesheng of Sun Yat-sen University School of Mathematics and Computer Science said that in order to play a super computer's role in solving major scientific problems in human beings, it not only needs high-performance hardware systems but also application software that can truly exert system performance, The core of this goal lies in the cultivation of supercomplicated talents. The ASC competition encourages innovation in supercomputer applications and will speed up the process of cultivating extra-budgetary talents in our country.