On February 4^th, 2024 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (hereinafter referred to as ASC24) released the results of preliminaries. SWPU delegation, with the code name "ASC644", has made it to the finals. This is the first time for SWPU students to move to the global finals, and also the only delegation from Southwest China to ASC24 global finals.

ASC24 is fairly competitive, attracting nearly 1,800 participants from over 350 delegations across six continents. Among them, 25 delegations have made it to the global finals, including those from Peking University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Southwest Petroleum University, and other universities.

The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge was initiated in 2012, with tens of thousands of university students from six continents registering to participate. It is the world's largest supercomputing competition and is one of the three major supercomputing competitions in the world, along with the German ISC and the American SC.

The competition was initiated and organized by China, together with supercomputing experts and institutions from Japan, Russia, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and other countries or regions, and was supported by supercomputing scholars and organizations from the United States, Europe and other countries and regions. ASC aims to promote the exchange and cultivation of young talents in supercomputing among countries and regions through competition platforms, enhance the level of supercomputing application and research and development capabilities, unleash the technological driving force of supercomputing, and promote technological and industrial innovation.

During the competition, each participating delegation (at most 5 persons) must complete five major tasks within 40 days: cluster building and adaptation, HPL/HPCG testing optimization, parallel computing optimization of the seepage numerical simulation software OpenCAEPoro, and the inference engine optimization based on the LLaMA2-70B large model.

The participants had to accomplish the tasks under a tight schedule. They need to prepare for the final exams while learning the knowledge involved in the competition, and then put forward reasonable optimization proposals, implemented the proposals and tested them within a limited time.

Under the guidance of supervisors, including Peng Bo, Zhang Quan, Li Yan, and Ji Kan, SWPU delegation succeeded in overcoming challenges such as large-scale parallel application acceleration and large model inference acceleration, stood out in the preliminary round and made it to the finals.

ASC24 global finals will be held at Shanghai University from April 9th to 13th, when SWPU delegation will compete with other teams from top universities around the world.

Experts, Supervisors and Student Representatives at ASC24 Kickoff Meeting