[Global Network Science and Technology reporter Wang Nan] Recently, the 2017ASC World University Supercomputer Contest (ASC17) finals held at the National Supercomputing Wuxi Center have come to an end. The 20 finalists from all over the world conducted a week-long fierce competition and finally Tsinghua. The college team performed well and won the championship and e Prize computing challenge award. Wang Endong, initiator of the ASC contest, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and chief scientist of the Inspur Group, stated that the ASC17 aims to promote the exchange and cultivation of young talents in various countries and regions through the competition platform, improve the level of super-computing applications and R&D capabilities, and use super-computing technologies to drive the development. Strengthen technology and industry innovation. ASC contest sponsor, academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering, chief scientist of Inspur Group Wang Endong 2017ASC: Breaking the World Record Highlights of Computing Performance The ASC Supercomputing Competition is the world's largest undergraduate supercomputing competition initiated by China. It has held six sessions so far, and this year has ushered in its seventh year. It is understood that this year's ASC17 Supercomputing Competition is jointly sponsored by the Asia Supercomputing Association, the National Supercomputing Wuxi Center, the Inspur Group and Zhengzhou University. In the contest, a total of 230 college teams were enrolled. They came from 15 countries and regions including China, the United States, Britain, Germany, India, Russia, Hungary, Brazil and South Africa. The game title set in this Super Finals is also quite rich, mainly involving super-computing system design, artificial intelligence, gene sequencing and so on. The finals will require the teams to use the Infrared Chaos supercomputing node provided by the organizing committee to design and construct their own supercomputers under the 3000W power constraint, and to run the artificial intelligence traffic prediction PaddlePaddle, the third generation gene sequencing assembly Falcon, and the large-scale molecular simulation LAMMPS. , benchmarking HPL and HPCG, etc. "The biggest feature in this process is that the topics are derived from actual life and production. The actual task is to be derived from actual research and work. Therefore, the optimization methods and results created in this area are immediately available. You can feed back into practical applications. I think this is a very meaningful point in the game. Everyone is not talking on paper, but is solving a real problem,†Wang Endong told reporters. The Tsinghua University team, who won the ASC championships three times, this time on the light of Taihu Lake, they performed the high-resolution marine numerical simulation model MASNUM nominated for the “Golden Gordon Bell Prize†2016, the highest award for international supercomputing applications. In-depth parallel optimization, and successfully extend the original program to more than 10,000 cores and 392 times the speed of operation, and in order to obtain the championship and e Prize computing challenge. Tsinghua University won the championship In addition, the team of the “Heima†Weifang Academy who entered the finals for the first time this time set an amazing performance of 31.7 trillion floating point operations per second under the constraint of 3000W power consumption, breaking the international performance record of HPL’s calculation performance in one stroke. , and won the highest computing performance award. Cao Jian, the captain of the Weifang Academy team, said in an interview after the game that their design scheme for the supercomputer system was temporarily changed from CPU to GPU solution until the day before the game, but the team had previously done a GPU card on the school's cluster. The power consumption test is still very confident with the temporary change plan. In the end, the Weifang Academy team successfully controlled the power consumption of a single GPU card to 173W, which was nearly 30% lower than the rated 250W power consumption, showing a very strong practical ability. “Although it is pleasing to break the world record of HPL's computational performance in the Supercomputing Competition, it is even more attractive to them to have the opportunity to operate the supercomputer “Shenwei Taihu Lightâ€, which ranks first in the world and represents the highest level in China and even in the world. Global supernatural genius study is also an important reason to attract players to participate.†Cao Jian said. Weifang University won the highest computing performance award Promote the application and landing of ecological construction Concerning the ASC17 competition situation, the chairman of the competition review committee, Mo Zeyi, made a summary. He said that the overall level of participation in the current team has been greatly improved compared to previous years, and many colleges and universities at home and abroad have demonstrated high levels of supercomputer application innovation capabilities. . The finals will require the teams to use the Infrared Chaos supercomputing node provided by the organizing committee to design and construct their own supercomputers under the 3000W power constraint, and to run the artificial intelligence traffic prediction PaddlePaddle, the third generation gene sequencing assembly Falcon, and the large-scale molecular simulation LAMMPS. , Benchmark HPL and HPCG, and other supernumerary applications, and run the optimized high-resolution ocean numerical simulation MASNUM on the "Light of the Sunway Taihu Lake", there is a mysterious application. And ARMIN B. CREMERS, emeritus professor at the University of Bonn in Germany, used the three keywords “ABC†to describe the three innovations of ASC17. Among them, A is the abbreviation of Accelerate, which means that there are many accelerators on the platform. The extensive use of accelerators provides good acceleration characteristics for the application of supercomputers and artificial intelligence. B is an acronym for Benchmark, which stands for the benchmark program for super calculation. As the application and the structure of the machine itself need to be continuously changed, the topics of the game selection will also make corresponding contributions to future application design and testing. C is an acronym for Competition and represents the continuous evolution of the China Supercomputer Contest. In particular, over the past few years, the China Supercomputer Contest has guided the culture and competitive awareness of university students, allowing more young students to master very complex supercomputer skills. It has played a role in promoting innovation in the future of supercomputer technology. Indeed, the greater value and significance of ASC is that it has also played a role in traction and driving the construction of China's supercomputing ecosystem and the landing of supercomputer applications. Training talents to build a platform for technology and industry Industry sources pointed out that the super-computing industry is constantly developing and expanding in China. This process requires production, learning, research, and use of all parties to strengthen exchanges. At the same time, the development of super-computing requires the balanced development of machinery, environment, and applications in order to promote long-term development. This is where the value of super-computing ecological construction lies. The ASC competition plays a very good role in this connection. For colleges and universities, the ASC supercomputing competition has enabled more college students to understand supercomputers and love supercomputers to train more talents; for supercomputing centers, the location of ASC contests spreads all over China's major rivers and rivers, and promotes foreign centers around the world. The bridge that attracts college students to join the innovation and industrial applications of the supercomputing technology has been bridged; for supercomputing providers, ASC also provides a promotion supercomputer technology, which provides the best display platform for testing the latest supercomputer technology. From the perspective of application promotion, the ASC competition is not only the world's largest college student supercomputing competition, but also the world's first supercomputing match with large-scale supercomputing systems and world science projects. For example, the title of ASC16 competition was once facing the world's largest radio telescope SKA. In this year's ASC finals, the participating teams were required to use their own devices, such as Inspur Supercomputer Node, to design their own super-computing systems and run cutting-edge scientific and engineering applications such as artificial intelligence traffic forecasting. The high-resolution ocean numerical simulation was completed on the world's fastest supercomputer, the “Light of Shenwei Taihu Lakeâ€. It can be seen that the combination of the most critical and major research projects in the world's largest platform is a very important feature of the supercomputing competition. In addition to these cutting-edge projects, ASC is also “advancing with the times†in the promotion of emerging applications. The ASC competition has set artificial intelligence as the representative emerging application topic since 2016. This year's artificial intelligence competition is also in cooperation with the international leading deep learning laboratory, allowing participating players to achieve a computer system through supercomputing and big data integration. The ability of the machine to predict the traffic conditions in the city will undoubtedly greatly promote the landing of artificial intelligence in China. According to Jack Dongarra, chairman of the ASC competition expert committee, the Top 500 promoter of the world's fastest supercomputer list, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the professor of the University of Tennessee, Jack A.D. has said that in the past ASC was mainly focused on Asia, but this year it had Asia. Apart from the participation of more teams, this is a very good phenomenon, indicating that ASC is attracting high attention from the global university team. As with SC and ISC, it has become one of the world's top undergraduate supercomputing competitions. At the same time, the increase in the number of participating teams has increased the level of competition, so that each team is aiming for a higher goal, and the game has also become more diverse. Chairman of the ASC Contest Expert Committee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Professor of the University of Tennessee Jack Tangalla "Imagine a laptop in 100,000 people's gym for on-line computing, and Taihu Light's computing power is equivalent to 100 such gymnasiums. This is an unreplicable experience for each participating team." Jack Tanga Pull said. Wang Endong believes that the current rapid development of artificial intelligence is bringing about tremendous changes in human society, and its core elements are calculations, data and algorithms. Under this trend, supercomputers will become important infrastructures for the smart society in the future, and their speed and level of development will be related to social development, improvement of life, and progress of civilization. The ASC competition is always committed to cultivating the future-oriented compound super-computing elite, which will allow the super-computing technology to better benefit the human society.