ZJU team clinches the first prize in ASC24 Student Supercomputing Challenge

On April 13, 2024, the ZJU Supercomputing Team won the First Prize and the Highest LINPACK award in the final round of the 2024 ASC (ASC24) Student Supercomputing Competition. This marks the second consecutive year that the ZJU Supercomputing Team has achieved the world’s highest performance in the HPL event. The team is composed of five students from the School of Computer Science and Technology, namely QIAN Xingjian (team leader), CHEN Kaiqi, XIE Jun, GENG Hua, and HUANG Jinjun, under the guidance of professors CHEN Jianhai, WANG Zeke, ZHANG Yin, HE Shuibing.

The ASC competition lasted for four months, including preliminary and final stages, requiring each team to strictly control the power consumption of their self-built supercomputing clusters to 3000 watts and complete seven competition tasks. From the moment they received the preliminary competition tasks, the mentors and students meticulously analyzed the tasks, discussed strategies, and excellently completed the requirements of the preliminary competition, advancing to the finals with a global ranking of third place all over the world.

At the finals, the ZJU Supercomputing Team, building upon the innovative one machine, eight cards architecture they designed and constructed last year, further enhanced the performance by adding an Nvidia A100 graphics card and a server to strengthen the CPU and GPU, ultimately forming a dual-machine, nine-card heterogeneous architecture that attracted the attention of the entire venue. This architecture secure first place in all tasks on the first day of the competition. The team members collaborated seamlessly, successfully analyzing, optimizing, and running various application tasks, and then ultimately won the First Prize in the finals and the Highest LINPACK award.

The competition tasks of this ASC edition showed significant interdisciplinary characteristics, requiring strong learning and innovation capabilities of cutting-edge scientific and engineering applications. On the final day of the competition, participating teams needed to summarize their performance in the finals. The motto of the ZJU Supercomputing Team is Infinite Cores, Infinite Possibilities, aiming to face the ultimate challenges of each task and optimize them to the extreme in parallel. The team's self-assembled cluster and efforts to overcome each task demonstrated the outstanding professional capabilities and tenacious spirit of the ZJU Supercomputing Team members.

During an interview, QIAN Xingjian, the leader of the Supercomputing Team, stated, Unlike the specialized courses in computer science, supercomputing competitions focus more on the full-chain combination from basic systems to practical applications. Throughout the entire preparation process, we not only need to understand how to optimize the code based on the characteristics of CPU and GPU architecture but also gain knowledge and skills in operations and maintenance, which comprehensively enhances our capabilities in the CS field.

The ASC World University Student Supercomputing Competition is jointly organized by the Asian Supercomputing Community and Shanghai University. The competition has been held for 11 sessions so far, attracting over thousands of students all over the world. Up to now, the ZJU Supercomputing Team has won seven First Prizes, five Second Prizes, and three Highest LINPACK awards with new records in past competitions.

Translated from the article on the WeChat of ZJUSCT

Translator: WANG Qiuyu(‘26, Journalism)

Photo: the interviewees

Editor: HAN Xiao(‘25 PhD, Education), TIAN Minjie