The championship of Parallel Application Challenge (PAC 2015) finished along with the High Performance Computing China 2015 (HPC China 2015) on 11th Nov, in Wuxi. 229 teams in total attended the competition, more than two times as many as that in the last year. Finally 16 teams got into the final round, and they were split in the competition for the champions of parallel optimization and parallel applications.
Ultimately, USTC succeeded in beating the other 8 teams and defending the champion of parallel optimization in PAC 2015. In the contest, team members applied various optimizing techniques to speed up the practical applications. Three contest applications achieved more than 40, 300, 980 faster performance each. As a result, USTC team achieved full marks on all the applications, much higher than the runner-up. Eventually, USTC team successfully defended its champion.
USTC team was made up of three juniors from School of Computer Science, Zhenyuan Ruan, Siran Yang, Yu Yin, and a senior from School of Gifted Young, Jiahui Yu. Supervisor Hong An said that compared with the previous contests, this contest had a great improvement no matter in number of teams and the quality of entries. The winning of USTC team had fully revealed the deep understanding of team members on the computer system architecture, and the skills to optimize applications in environments of single CPU, multiple CPU+MIC, and the advanced cluster. The excellent performance exhibited by the members highly impressed the reviewers and experts in the competition.
Parallel Application Challenges (PAC, http://www.pac-hpc.com) is a nation-wide competition co-hosted by Intel (China) Co. Ltd. and High Performance Computing of China Computer Federation (CCF TCHPC). This contest features the cross-discipline across High Performance Computing (HPC) and its Applications. It testifies the competitors on both the master of techniques of computer science and HPC, and moreover, the comprehensive ability to apply both to the practical problems. With the objective to broaden the horizons and promote the mutual exchanges among students, PAC has attracted attention from both industries and academe since it was launched. Currently, it is the biggest competition in the domain of high performance computing in China. USTC team has been the runner-up in the PAC 2013, the champion in the PAC 2014. In PAC 2015, USTC team won the champion once more, successfully defending the champion.
Figure 1 the scene of contest.
(LI Yang, School of Computer Science and Technology)
