A few days ago the results of the ASC17 Supercomputer Contest were announced, and SUSTech has a laureate. Under the guidance of Professor Li Jingzhi from the Department of Mathematics, and assistant professor Wang Qi from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, after relentless efforts the SUSTech team has been awarded the Second Class Prize, selected from over 300 teams from across the world.

The competition consists of participants designing and optimizing a server cluster, and the goal of the contest is to learn about high-performance computers, develop research and applications in the field and build a platform where students can exchange.

The ASC World University Supercomputer Contest was established in China and involves members from Japan, Russia, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, the United States and Europe. The international supercomputer community is very supportive of the concept because it is a great way to bring together young future experts, which will be a major driving force for innovation in the industry. ASC is the world’s largest supercomputer competition, and along with ISC in Germany and SC in the USA, makes the world’s top 3 super-contests. SUSTech’s team also participated in the ASC contest last year and received a prize of Excellence.

Supercomputers are used in a wide range of applications ranging from weather forecasting to physical simulations (such as simulations of the early moments of the universe, airplane and spacecraft aerodynamics, the detonation of nuclear weapons, and nuclear fusion). Their future development will assist many scientific fields to make considerable progress, and China is a key player in their future development, holding the record for the fastest systems since 2013 (NRCPC Sunway TaihuLight and NUDT Tianhe-2A).

Contributed by: Department of Computer Science, Edited by: Jeremy Welburn