Date：July 04, 2021

Source: School of Intelligent System Science and Engineering

JNU won third prize in the finals of ISC21, the top annual competition in the field of supercomputers, behind only Tsinghua University and Nanyang Technological University, according to results announced on July 1. The JNU team, who topped Tsinghua University in early May in the ASC World Supercomputer Contest, was making its debut in ISC.

All teams were required to complete environment construction and optimization of the competition between May 24 and June 20 with the help of the supercomputing system provided by the Singapore National Supercomputing Center and the supercomputing system called Niagara provided by the University of Toronto. The competition challenges included HPCC (high performance computing and communications), HPL (high-performance LINPACK), HPCG (high--performance conjugate gradients), WRF (weather research and forecasting), the Python code GPAW, MetaHipMer 2.0 (DNA sequence assembly), LAMMPS (molecular dynamics simulation) and coding.

Hosted by the High-Performance Computing Advisory Council, ISC is the world's oldest and Europe’s top conference and network event in the field. It is one of the world's top three supercomputer events, along with the ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge, initiated by China and other major Asian countries, and the SC Student Supercomputer Challenge, which originated in the United States. 

(JNU team on contest defense)

Undergraduate teams from 13 universities around the world were invited to enter this year's finals, including the South Africa High-Performance Computing Center, a veteran ISC competitor that has won four gold medals, three silver and one bronze;  the University of Science and Technology of China , the ISC20 champion; Nanyang Technological University in Singapore; Sun Yat-sen University; Shanghai University of Science and Technology; Xi'an Jiaotong University; Heidelberg University in Germany; Catalan University of Technology in Spain; Tsinghua University, the SC20 student cluster competition champion; National Tsinghua University and National Cheng Kung University, the 2020 Asia Pacific HPC-AI competition champion and runner-up, and the winning team of the Computing Insight UK 2020 Challenge. Jinan University was invited to participate as the champion of the ASC20-21 competition.