Warsaw Team (WT) has performed well in the finals of the ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge 2020-2021. UW students won gold in Machine Learning “Language Exam (LE) Challenge” and bronze in PRESTO application. WT was one of seven international teams that took part in the competition’s final virtually and in this online category scored first place in benchmark tests twice: HPL with 21.78 TFlops and HPCG with 619.75 GFlops.
The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge is the world’s largest supercomputing hackathon. ASC serves to challenge and inspire the next generation of HPC scientists and engineers to deliver innovative solutions. The number of teams applying to ASC exceeds 300, of which 20 to 30 (28 in this edition) go to the strict – 72-hour final. Warsaw Team was among the teams that participated in the tournament virtually, together with students from Hong Kong, Colombia, Thailand, Taiwan, Australia and Russia. The other 21 Chinese teams competed on-site at Shenzhen University.
WT comprises students Marek Skiba, Patrycja Krzyna, Paweł Pawłowski, (all at University of Warsaw) and Marek Masiak (University College London) and Jan Malinowski (University of Oxford). The team is trained by three staff members of the UW Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM): Maciej Szpindler, Marcin Semeniuk, Michał Hermanowicz, and Łukasz Kondraciuk from the UW Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics, and Mechanics.
The 2020-2021 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC20-21) finals took place on 8th-12th May 2021. Out of 350 universities (8 500+ students), only 28 teams qualified for the finals and faced several challenging tasks. One of them was pulsar search using the open-source software, PRESTO (PulsaR Exploration and Search Toolkit), and the real observational data gathered by FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope) to search for pulsar signals within the shortest time possible.