ISC 2020 Student Cluster Competition: The Winner Is….

Students from China’s University of Science and Technology (USTC) won first place in this year’s annual Student Cluster Competition at the ISC 2020 Digital conference.

This year’s competition focused on the global fight against Covid-19 by including applications that address education and applied learning towards accelerating bioscience research and discovery. The teams, totaling 80 students, were tasked to test several applications used by scientists and researchers for finding a cure for the pandemic.

The USTC team, comprised of six members, beat out 14 other student teams from 11 countries to win the prestigious award.

Second place went to the seven-member team from the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), South Africa; third place went to the six-member “Team Diablo” from Tsinghua University in China; and the “fan favorite’ award went to the six-member team from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain.

Students were granted access to supercomputing resources and support from the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC), Singapore. The teams were challenged to demonstrate applied learnings and share real-world results by running Tinker-HP, a massively parallel molecular dynamics package for multiscale simulations of complex systems in wide use in the bioscience research community.

Team from University of Science & Technology China – Winner of ISC 2020 Digital Student Cluster Competition

The competition, run by the HPC AI Advisory Council, “is part of the global effort to educate and train the next generation of scientists and programmers to aid the world in viral outbreaks or pandemics in the future,” the council said.

A video introducing the student cluster teams can be found here.