The Opening Ceremony of the 2022 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC22) was held on January 19, 2022. In-person participants attended gatherings in Beijing, and at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. In addition, more than three hundred registered teams’ representatives from around the world participated online.

The ASC22 is focused on the integration of HPC and AI. The preliminary round started on January 5, 2022, with registered teams competing on two challenging tasks: Yuan – a large AI language model, and DeePMD-kit – an excellent combination of AI and advanced scientific supercomputing application. It will end on March 4, 2022, when the participants should have their application optimization proposals submitted. The Preliminary results and finalists will be announced on March 21. The selected teams will be invited to participate in-person in the finals from May 7 to May 11, 2022, at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and teams unable to attend in-person will participate virtually from HPC infrastructure hosted on Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) cloud. All finalists will optimize the HPL & HPCG benchmarks and a number of AI & HPC applications. They will present the results in English before a panel of judges, to compete for the Champion Prize, Silver Prize, e Prize, the Highest LINPACK, and other awards.

The ASC Committee appreciates that ASC22 on-site finals will be the hosted by world-renowned University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). The USTC student teams have won several times the Champion and Silver Prize in worldwide Student Supercomputing Competitions.

Also, the ASC Committee appreciates that AWS will provide credits and technical support for student clusters built on the cloud during the ASC22 finals. AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud, offering over two hundred services and a suite of HPC-focused services and products. Millions of customers are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

Wang Endong, ASC Challenge initiator, and member of Chinese Academy of Engineering, said, "Cultivating talents requires long-term efforts. Discovering and nurturing young talents in supercomputing is exactly what ASC aims to achieve. Many, many students deepened their understanding of supercomputing and broadened their horizons through the competition. After the graduation, they have been committed to the R&D of supercomputing and its applications and have notched-up success, setting a good example for the new generation. As an international arena for promoting knowledge sharing and collaboration, the ASC competition has achieved remarkable results in talent development, especially in the international exchange of young talents. With 10 years of history, the competition has developed a unique culture that attracts more and more people to participate."

Zhou Congzhao, Vice President of the USTC, pointed out that “high-performance computing and AI play an essential, strategic role in the development of technologies and industries. USTC's research and applications in high performance computing spans all disciplines of science and engineering. They have also established a comprehensive program for developing talents for high-performance computing. In 2022, ASC is celebrating its 10th anniversary, and the ASC22 finals will spur USTC to go further in cultivating talents and developing advanced technologies in high-performance computing.”

Debra Goldfarb, Director of HPC Products/Strategy, AWS, greeted the participants: “We are thrilled about the opportunity for a second year for AWS supporting ASC competition. The HPC space is evolving very rapidly, and cloud is opening up all sorts of new opportunities. I really welcome the students into this competition to learn about the future of HPC technologies. It will give you the opportunity to practice hands-on and really demonstrate what your team has the capacity to do.”

Jack Dongarra, Member of National Academy of Engineering, and Distinguished Professor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, also addressed the opening ceremony: "The ASC competition strives to foster the next generation of young talents to inspire exploration, innovation and collaboration in supercomputing and AI. Participants will take away a better understanding of how to work together as a team, and grow into the next generation of computational scientists."

At the opening ceremony, previous participants celebrated ASC's 10th anniversary, and shared what ASC brought, and what they have learned from the competition during the years.

To help the ASC22 student participants to better prepare for the competition, the ASC committee organized from January 20 to 21, 2022 the traditional online training camp. There, high-performance computing and AI experts from world-renowned academic institutions and high-tech companies explained the competition rules in detail, provided training, and shared the most recent expertise about cluster design and evaluation, accelerated computing, parallel optimization, AI deep learning training optimization, etc. Previous ASC Student Supercomputing Competition winners also shared their pleasant memories, experiences, and suggestions.

About ASC

The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge is organized by Asia Supercomputer Community and supported by Asian, European, and American experts and institutions. The main objectives of ASC are to encourage exchange and training of young supercomputing talent from around the world, improve supercomputing applications and R&D capacity, boost the development of supercomputing, and promote technical and industrial innovation. The first ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge was held in 2012, and since then has attracted over 10,000 undergraduates from all over the world. Learn more about ASC at http://www.asc-events.net/.

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