BU Students Return from ASC’16 Competition in Wuhan, China
BUHPC (Boston University High Performance Computing), a part of BUILDS, competed in the Asian Student Cluster Competition in Wuhan, China this past week. Over 175 teams from all over the world competed in the preliminary rounds of whom 16 teams were invited to the final round.
At the competition, teams run scientific applications as well as benchmarks on a cluster that they’ve setup all while staying below a 3000 watt power limit.
The BUHPC team decided to go with a six node cluster running 2 Intel Xeon E5 CPU’s per node, 1 Intel Xeon phi accelerator per node, 128 gb of ram per node, and infiniband fdr as the interconnect.
As well as running applications of the cluster, teams were given the opportunity to run a Deep Neural Net application on Tianhe-2, the world’s fastest supercomputer.
The BUHPC team was recognized with a First Class Award which signified the difficulty of getting into the top 16 teams at the competition. The team was excited to return to China and do significantly better than they did last year at ASC ’15.
From left to right: Qingqing Xiong ECE PHD, Satoe Sakuma CS ’17, Wasim Kahn ECE ’17, Winston Chen ECE ’16, Sean Smith CS ’17, Hannah Gibson ECE ’17