GPUs Win the Day at ASC14 Student Cluster Competition

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Over at the Nvidia Blog, George Middleton writes that GPUs once-again powered the winning team at the recent ASC14 Student Cluster Competition in China. Nvidia seems to be on a roll here, as this is the seventh time in a row that a GPU based system powered the winning team in a student cluster competition.

teamPictured here, the team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) took the top spot in the largest student supercomputer challenge, ASC14, held last month. At the same time, the top three teams all relied on NVIDIA GPUs.

And the new NVIDIA K40 GPUs helped China’s Sun Yat-sen University set a new record. The team got a record 9.27 teraflops on the HPC industry standard Linpack performance benchmark. The previous record: 8.45 teraflops.

Armed with a student-built cluster powered by eight NVIDIA K20 GPU accelerators, SJTU earned the highest total score for performance on six tests. These included runs on the elastic wave modeling application, 3D-EW; a run on quantum chemistry application, Quantum ESPRESSO; and other real-world scientific codes.

We need to educate new legions of students in high-performance computing,” said James Lin, vice director Center for HPC at SJTU. “Teaching HPC skills in a competition like this can be more effective than in a classroom. In fact, as a result of his experience, one of our team members decided to focus on an HPC PhD at Virginia Tech.”

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In related news, 11 teams will face off in the next Student Cluster Challenge at ISC’14 in Leipzig.