On June 21, German local time, ISC17 Student Cluster Competition finished in Frankfurt. The student high-performance computing (HPC) team of Tsinghua University, consisting of DCST undergraduates, won the championship. Meanwhile, they were also the winner of Solving the Captcha Challenge, in which teams were required to recognize verification codes using deep learning approach. To date, our university has won 3 times of ISC championship in the past 6 years. This year we both won ASC and ISC student cluster competitions.

Each team was asked to set up a HPC cluster system under the condition of 3 kW power limit. The competition quests include the benchmarks HPCC and HPCG, the partial differential equation computing platform FEniCS, the plane-wave density functional theory modeling application MiniDFT, the molecular dynamics simulator LAMMPS, and the popular deep learning framework TensorFlow.

The team entered a new preparation period after winning ASC champion and added new members. As the date of this competition happened to be in our final exam weeks, our team had to take multi-tasks. Right after they arrived in Germany, they grasped every minute to prepare themselves for the ISC competition, making a breakthrough. In the end, DCST team won the championship on behalf of Tsinghua University. South African’s CHPC (centre for high performance computing) team won the second place, and Beihang University won the third place. The Tsinghua team, together with the Beihang team and NTU (Nanyang Technological University) team, correctly recognized all the testing verification codes, and shared the winner of this challenge.

The ISC17 Student Cluster Competition is hosted by the HPC Advisory Council. ISC, SC and ASC Student Cluster Competitions are the world's top 3 prestigious international supercomputing competitions. This year, 11 teams from 7different countries came to on-site competition of ISC. The Tsinghua team is composed of undergraduates from DCST. The members are Ye Fangke, Li Yuxuan, Feng Guanyu, Ka Cheong Lau, Li Beichen, Xie Lei. Wang Miao, who is a HPC veteran, served as a technical supporter. The team advisors are Assistant Professor Zhai Jidong and postdoctoral researcher Han Wentao, both from DCST.

Reference website

http://hpcadvisorycouncil.com/events/student-cluster-competition/

https://www.isc-events.com/isc17_em/