Supercomputers and high-speed computing are key to the development of modern science and technology, and fostering talented individuals in the field is an important task which the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) is dedicated to. The National Center for High‑Performance Computing (NCHC) of NARLabs therefore organized the 2nd High Performance Application Competition (HiPAC), attracting outstanding programmers from high school to university level nationwide to challenge themselves in computing. After a heated competition, the team "NTHU-team2" from National Tsing Hua University were crowned champions, earning a prize of NT$100,000, while teams "NTHU-ZY" from National Tsing Hua University and "YoshiGawa" from National Cheng Kung University won second and third place, respectively. Special mention was awarded to two high school teams, one of students from National Chiayi Senior High School and Mingdao High School, and the other of students from the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University and Taipei Fuhsing Private School.
HiPAC is modeled after the Student Cluster Competition (SCC¹) , the largest international supercomputer competition, and tests students' ability to configure and use supercomputers, including installation of cluster computing environments², optimization of computing performance, and applied problems. The competition aims to stimulate the interest and enthusiasm of Taiwan's students in learning supercomputer skills and foster the development of future talent who may one day use supercomputing to help solve problems in various fields, adding new momentum into high-speed computation in Taiwan.
The computers used for HiPAC were located remotely, and each team was pROVided with four independent mainframes, each containing two CPUs and four Tesla P100 GPUs. Teams must log in and set up cluster environments, build middleware, and test parallel computing performance. Two applied problems and one mystery problem were also designed for students to use their computing skills for problem solving. This year's applied problems were on the topics of fluid dynamics and atmospheric science. The former tested the ability of contestants to use Basilisk, an open-source fluid dynamics library, to solve and apply parallel programs, while the latter required teams to reproduce the development of last September's Typhoon Muifa and simulate its path. The mystery question, which was announced on-site, involved HPL-AI, a kind of software used for benchmarking server AI computing performance. This problem tested competitors' versatility and pROVided an extra challenge for the teams.
Winning team NTHU-team2 effectively utilized all hardware and mastered the applied problems. Upon their victory, NTHU-team2 expressed gratitude to NCHC for pROViding them with the valuable opportunity to run their first full hands-on high-performance computing project. They will go on to use what they have learned in the 2023 APAC HPC-AI Competition, which will be held online in August to October this year.
Professor Kuo-Chan Huang of the Department of Computer Science at National Taichung University of Education, who served as a judge, stated that passing down and building up supercomputing skills is very important, and that we can see hope in this field through the motivation of young scholars. Another judge, Professor Chun-Yuan Lin of the Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering at Asia University, indicated that our now-popular AI has a strong underpinning of high-performance computing and encouraged students to use what they have learned in the future by incorporating high-performance computing into their daily lives.
In addition to the five teams participating in this year's competition, there were also three observing teams; participants from the HPC X AI Summer Camp co-organized by NCHC and National Tsing Hua University also came to visit and learn more about the competition on-site. NCHC Director General Chau-Lyan Chang stated that through this arrangement, we can expect to have a continuous supply of high-speed computing talent for the future. Director General Chang also encouraged more young students who aspire to the field of supercomputing to gain an in-depth understanding of the subject through participation in the competition, then utilize their knowledge in practical and interdisciplinary applications to impROVe lives with technology. These young students are hoped to become the driving force promoting development of science and technology in the near future.
¹ SC, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis is the world's premier conference on high-speed computing, and SCC is the world's highest-level competition for students around the world on supercomputer integration and program performance. Participating teams must assemble a supercomputer containing hardware and software and use it to solve problems in a limited amount of time and with limited power consumption
² "Cluster" refers to the use of multiple small computers that are networked together to form a large, distributed computing architecture. Clusters impROVe performance and usability and are generally more cost-effective than equivalent large-scale computers. Over half of the top 500 supercomputers are computer clusters.
