In the early morning of November 20th, the results of Supercomputing Conference 2020 (SC20) Student Cluster Competition finals were announced. The team formed by students from the School of EECS, Peking University, won the silver medal. It is worth mentioning that 5 out of the 6 members in the team come from the Turing Class. Congratulations!  

PKU Student Supercomputing Team Members

A total of 19 teams around the globe participated in this final, including Peking University, Tsinghua University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, and etc. The team representing PKU in this competition is composed of six undergraduates from the School of EECS, including Pengcheng Xu (Turing Class of 2017), Yueyang Pan (Turing Class of 2018), Zejia Fan (Turing Class of 2017), Fangyuan Yang (Class of 2017), Yuchen Gu (Turing Class of 2018), Zhewen Hao (Turing Class of 2019). Yun Liang, associate professor of School of EECS, and Zhenxin Fu, a graduate student, served as the advisors.

Interview after the Competition

Due to COVID-19, the competition has moved to the cloud to accommodate remote participation, becoming the Virtual Student Cluster Competition (VSCC). Teams were required to design and build virtual clusters in the Microsoft Azure cloud. With a limit of $3,700 for the cloud computing budget, teams also need to complete 3 cluster performance tests (HPL, HPCG, IO-500) and 4 scientific computing applications (CESM, GROMACS, reproduce experiments from an SC19 research paper "MemXCT: memory-centric X-ray CT reconstruction with massive parallelization", and a mystery application given at the start of the competition "miniVite: a distributed-memory graph community detection and clustering mini-application").

With multiple targeted trainings and all the efforts, PKU student supercomputing team overcame various difficulties during the competition, such as changes in the rules, time differences due to the virtual competition, and fatigue from 72 hours of continuous battle.

PKU Student Supercomputing Team Poster

The Student Cluster Competition (SCC) was developed in 2007 to provide an immersive high-performance computing experience to undergraduate and high school students. SCC is an opportunity for students to showcase their expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition demonstrating the breadth of skills, technologies, and science that it takes to assemble, maintain, and utilize supercomputers to impress HPC-industry judges. As an important part of SC, SCC, together with ASC and ISC are the world's three most authoritative international supercomputing competitions.