Source: School of Computer Science and Engineering
Written by: Wu Suizhen
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

On the morning of November 19th, the announcement that the supercomputing team from Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) won the championship of the IndySCC competition came from the committee of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC21).


IndySCC is a new track for high performance computing in the Student Cluster Competition of the 2021 SC conference. Competitors included teams from top universities in the field of computer science, such as University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and ETH Zurich. The SYSU team is the only team from China in the 2021 IndySCC competition.

As in traditional supercomputing competitions for students, the teams participating in IndySCC were required to deploy and optimize the classic molecular dynamics package GROMACS, the parallel password cracker John the Ripper and a previously undisclosed library for accelerating finite difference computation, Devito, during the 48 hours of the continuous run challenge.

For preparation, the teams must take various aspects into consideration before selecting the configuration of their machines. They were then required to make use of the limited computing resources effectively and keep the total power consumption under 1100w during the whole course of competition. The best performance was aimed to be achieved under such strictly restricted conditions.

The SYSU team participating in the IndySCC competition consists of six undergraduates, including one from the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Tianxiang Lyu) and five from the School of Computer Science and Engineering (Jing Lan, Jingrun Zhang, Wenkai Shao, Tianhao Lin, Xuanteng Huang). Two advisors, Dr. Dan Huang and Zhiguang Chen, are also from the School of Computer Science and Engineering.

During the overall 48-hour competition, the SYSU team continuously gave satisfactory performance. Although two applications had already been announced before the competition, the additional input sample did form a challenge for the members. With composure and agility, the team successfully solved all the problems. After a final oral defense in front of the committee, their championship was secured.

Relying on the faculty from the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the resources of the National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou, the SYSU supercomputing team has become a remarkable competitor in major supercomputing competitions at home and abroad.

The team exhibited excellence in all three international supercomputing competitions. In addition to the recent one, they have already won the third place and the award of Highest LINPACK in ASC 20-21 Student Supercomputer Challenge. In ISC High Performance 2021, the team also won the fourth place and the title of Honorable Mention.

Besides, the team performed significantly in domestic competitions. They have already experienced three successes this year, winning the third place in the 2nd Priority Research Application (PRA21 in the track for CP2K application), the 5th China Parallel application Challenge on domestic CPU (CPC), and the 2nd ACM-China International Parallel Computing Challenge (IPCC).