ZJU supercomputing team wins first prize and application innovation award at ASC26

The Zhejiang University (ZJU) Supercomputing Team recently achieved outstanding results at the finals of the 13th ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC26) held in Jiangsu Province. Despite intense competition and hardware limitations, the team secured the First Prize and won the Application Innovation Award (awarded for the highest performance on a single application), ranking fifth globally in total score.

The ZJU team consisted of five undergraduate students: HONG Yixun (captain), LIU Ye, LIU Tianyang, and JING Chun from the College of Computer Science and Technology, and YE Nacheng from the School of Mathematical Sciences. They were guided on-site by teachers CHEN Jianhai and WANG Zeke, with additional guidance from ZHANG Yin, HE Shuibing, ZHUANG Bohan, and ZHAO Binbin.

During the competition, the team adopted a five machines, nine cards architecture (comprising one H100, four A100, and four W7900D GPUs), which provided the least advanced computing resources among the top-tier teams. To overcome this hardware gap, the team strategically optimized their system architecture to maximize computing power. This approach enabled them to successfully complete highly challenging tasks, including world model inference optimization, numerical simulation of gravitational waves, and quantum circuit simulation.

The team's performance in the gravitational wave numerical simulation was particularly remarkable. Starting with incomplete GPU code, they added more than 60 CUDA kernels and a complete GPU runtime. Through system-level optimizations—such as memory management, memory layout optimization, shared memory differential blocking, and communication pipelining—they achieved the highest application performance worldwide, earning them the prestigious Application Innovation Award.

To build a sustainable talent pipeline, the team also sent 21 observing members to the finals to learn from and exchange ideas with other top teams. Since its establishment in 2014, the ZJU Supercomputing Team has excelled in premier international competitions like ASC, ISC, SC, and IndySCC, accumulating nine ASC First Prizes and two IndySCC Global Championships. The team continues to promote the integration of industry, education, and research, applying their competition experience to academic research and campus services.

Adapted and translated from the article written by ZJU Supercomputing Team
Translator: DING Chenwei
Photo: the interviewees
Editor: DING Chenwei