Bitmain helps Tsinghua University supercomputing team win the runner-up in ISC16

In the past few days, you may have noticed this news: China's supercomputer "Sunway TaihuLight" has just won the world's first place. This is the seventh time in a row that China has surpassed the United States to become the world's first. To add icing on the cake, in the just-concluded ISC16 International Student Supercomputing Competition in Frankfurt, the Tsinghua Supercomputing Team stood out and won the runner-up, handing in a wonderful answer to this competition.

(Coach: Li Kaiwei, Award-winning team: Wang Miao, Ye Fangke, Li Beichen, Li Yuxuan, Zhuo Youwei, Liu Jiachang, Feng Guanyu; Instructors: Han Wentao, Zhai Jidong, Chen Wenguang;)

The "Top 500 Fastest Supercomputers in the World" is updated every two years. In the latest list updated on Monday, China not only became the owner of the world's fastest computer for the seventh consecutive time, but also the country with the largest number of top 500 computers. It is worth mentioning that this is the first time that a country other than the United States has achieved this. In the field of science, supercomputers are regarded as the main indicator of a country's leading science and technology. The leading position in the field of supercomputers is undoubtedly vital to national interests. Supercomputers are often used for work that requires a lot of calculations, such as weather forecasting, climate research, computational chemistry, molecular models, astrophysical simulations, automotive design simulations, and cryptanalysis. Although my country has taken a leading position in hardware in recent years, it has to be admitted that it is still lacking in talent reserves. Internationally, there are supercomputing competitions held to promote the connection between college students and the industrial community, promote the exchange and training of young supercomputing talents in various regions of the world, and improve the level of supercomputing applications and R&D capabilities: the SC International Student Supercomputing Competition in the United States, the ISC International Student Supercomputing Competition in Germany, and the ASC Asian Student Supercomputing Competition are collectively known as the three major international student supercomputing competitions. In 2015, Tsinghua University's supercomputing team won the championships in three international university supercomputing competitions: ASC15, ISC15, and SC15. This year, Tsinghua University's supercomputing team lived up to expectations and participated in the ISC International Supercomputing Competition again and won the runner-up in ISC16, which also proved China's strength in both hardware and talent in the field of supercomputing to a certain extent. Participating in supercomputing competitions is not an easy task. From finding sponsors to provide funds and equipment, to building and testing the participating clusters and transporting the clusters to the competition site, university teams often need to spend months preparing. First of all, there must be enough equipment to support high-speed computing, that is, supercomputers.

After unremitting contact, communication and coordination, Bitmain, a technology company headquartered in Beijing, sponsored the server for the Tsinghua Supercomputing Team in this event. Bitmain is committed to providing supercomputing chips, hardware and software products such as high-speed, low-power computing chips, high-power, high-density computing servers and large-scale parallel computing software. It has grown rapidly into the world's largest Bitcoin mining full-ecosystem service provider with the largest market share. Its Antminer with excellent performance, Antpool with the best experience and HashNest, a stable and reliable cloud mining platform, are ranked first in the world, with customers in more than 100 countries around the world. At the same time, Bitmain will launch the first generation of deep learning algorithm acceleration chips and boards at the end of this year, and plans to launch AI cloud services in 2017 to enable big data users to quickly develop and deploy their AI applications.

This sponsorship is to promote the rapid growth of the younger generation of supercomputers, and also to show optimism and support for the Tsinghua University supercomputer team. Seeing such a result, the head of Bitmain expressed great appreciation. Zhai Jidong, the instructor of this year's Tsinghua supercomputer team, is also the instructor of the supercomputer team that won the championship last year. Despite having many years of experience in participating in the competition, the entire team did not slack off at all. During the competition, the participating university teams were required to perform application and Linpack tests under the power consumption limit of 3,000 watts, and the judges of the competition finally decided the champion based on the total score of each item.

The Tsinghua team was not timid. With their solid basic skills and previous experience, they explained the content of their presentation to the judges and won unanimous praise from the judges. In addition to Tsinghua University's outstanding performance, other Chinese school teams also performed well, with Shanghai Jiaotong University winning the third place in the overall score. With the experience of winning consecutive awards and the rapid development of the computer field, I believe that more students will grow into talents who lead the direction of world computer development.