Intel has announced the winners of the Great Cross-Architecture Challenge, a collaboration with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and Argonne National Laboratory, and run by CodeProject.
Winner of a summer CERN openlab internship or $8,000 cash:
- Eugenio Marinelli of Sophia Antipolis, France, leveraged oneAPI’s cross-architecture libraries and tools to develop a new application that decodes digital data stored in synthetic DNA. This new storage method provides easy, quick and inexpensive data archival storage that can last centuries, even in harsh environments.
Winner of a chance to work on a oneAPI-related project with Argonne or $8,000 cash:
- Andrew Pastrello of Sydney, Australia, showed the ease of porting CUDA code and modified the application using DPC++ and oneAPI tools to synthesize audio from gravitational waveforms produced by black hole simulations to be used in music production and astronomy education.
Winners of a trip to CERN or $5,000 cash:
- Rafael Campos of Lisbon, Portugal, demonstrated oneAPI’s development by adapting OpenCL applications to improve the performance of bioinformatic applications. The solution has the potential to improve epistasis detection, enabling early detection of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and various cancers.
- Zhen Ju of Shenzhen, China, showed the ease of migrating a CUDA-based application and the benefits of an open programming model that serves various architectures. The application port filters redundant sequences in gene research, benefiting pharmaceutical discoveries, agriculture and medical care.
- Ricardo Nobre of Lisbon, Portugal, used the Intel DPC++ Compatibility Tool to port a CUDA-based application, with more than 95 percent of the code automatically migrated. The application utilizes CPU and GPU devices to detect new associations between genotypes and phenotypes, potentially resulting in improved preventative care, personalized treatments and drug development.
The hallenge invited software developers to use oneAPI to create fast, efficient and future-ready applications that take advantage of various XPUs, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and other accelerators. Participants had access to free resources, such as code samples, developer guides, webinars and the DevMesh developer collaboration portal to help speed their development.
The five prize winners were selected by a panel of six judges who evaluated the contest entries based on innovation, impact on humanity, use of cross-architecture computing, overall usefulness for target audience, level of coding expertise and quality of project explanation. Twenty applicants will receive $500 cash prizes for their submissions. The challenge attracted participants across five continents Entrants used oneAPI and Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) to create applications in areas such as bioinformatics, cryptography, data analytics, education, financial services, genomics, healthcare, image processing, mathematics, molecular dynamics, particle physics and ray tracing.
Participants used free Intel oneAPI Toolkits and the Intel DevCloud, which enables testing of code and workloads across a variety of Intel XPU architectures to update an existing C/C++ application, to port a compute unified device architecture (CUDA) application to DPC++ or create an entirely new oneAPI application to work on multiple architectures.
“The participants in the Great Cross-Architecture Challenge demonstrated the potential of oneAPI,” said Maria Girone, chief technology officer, CERN openlab. “Through its use, they were able to write code for heterogeneous hardware architectures with a diverse range of applications. People from across the world were able to access cutting-edge technology through this developer challenge. We look forward to welcoming the winners of the competition to CERN.”
“The challenge was an exciting opportunity to explore oneAPI and its power to develop applications across heterogenous computing architectures,” said Katherine Riley, director of Science at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. “The entries covered a breadth of topics and used multiple approaches that illustrated oneAPI’s vast potential — and the creativity of the participants! We look forward to bringing that creativity to Argonne as we prepare for our upcoming exascale system, Aurora.”
