China Shocks the Supercomputer Community Again with HUST's HPL Championship at ISC'13

BEIJING, June 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- On June 19 (German time), the 2013 International Student Cluster Challenge (ISC'13) closed in Leipzig, Germany. The team of Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) from China won the Best Linpack award and set a world new record with 8.455TFLOPS. The team from the Centre for High Performance Computing of South Africa won the Overall Best award, and the team from Tsinghua University ranked second in terms of overall score at ISC'13. It is China's second championship at ISC'13 after Tianhe-2 claimed the lead in the Top500 list. The world marveled at China's rapid development in system research, application development, and talent education of supercomputers.

Jointly organized by the organizing committee of International Supercomputing Conference and the Advisory Council of High Performance Computing (HPC AC), ISC is known as one of the top three world supercomputer competitions alongside the SC from the U.S. and the Asia Student Supercomputer Challenge from China. ISC grants two awards, namely, Overall Winner and Highest Linpack winner.

Each team is required to structure on its own the supercomputer system with a total power budget of 3kW, on which two performance benchmark tests, namely, HPCC and HPL, as well as five application performance tests, namely, GROMACS, MILC, WRF, AMG, and CP2K, would be conducted. It is an all-round assessment of supercomputer skills, experience, and knowledge of the teams in the competition. "Our team members came closer to and learned more about supercomputers through the competition. It is beyond their reach in the classroom. Just like the words on their T-shirts, they are the next generation of high-performance computing experts," said Shi Xuanhua, the mentor of HUST team.

The teams from HUST and Tsinghua University won high recognition from participants and other teams for their strong overall strength. The mentor from Chemnitz University of Technology of Germany said, "Chinese teams are impressive. Besides their commitment, they have extensive supercomputer application experience with a very broad view on problem solving."

Chinese teams won the two major awards, namely, Overall Winner and Highest Linpack at ISC'12. An expert pointed out that Chinese teams' excellent performance in the two competitions and Tianhe-2's ranking as No. 1 in the latest Top500 list released at ISC'13 demonstrates that China has made great progress in talent training, as well as basic technological research and application of supercomputers, forming a healthy industrial system.

The teams of HUST and Tsinghua University structured their high performance clusters in this competition with Inspur NF5280M3 supercomputer nodes. With stable and excellent performance in the entire competition process, such supercomputer server supported Chinese university teams to win the overall championship and best performance awards at ISC'12, SC'12, and ASC'13. It is said that Inspur is also an organizer of ASC, which is participated by 43 higher education institutions from a dozen of countries and regions in Asia, and outweighs ISC'13 in scale.

More information at http://hpc.inspur.com/news/23593.shtml