NTU takes top spot in US supercomputing challenge

Associate Professor Francis Lee (centre) with the NTU team that bagged the top prize, comprising undergraduates (clockwise from bottom left) Shao Yiyang, Hao Meiru, Chen Hailin, Tang Shuqian, team captain Liu Siyuan and Shi Ziji.
Associate Professor Francis Lee (centre) with the NTU team that bagged the top prize, comprising undergraduates (clockwise from bottom left) Shao Yiyang, Hao Meiru, Chen Hailin, Tang Shuqian, team captain Liu Siyuan and Shi Ziji. ST PHOTO: MARK CHEONG

In the world of supercomputing, some consider taking part in the student cluster competition at the Supercomputing Conference (SCC) 2017 a major achievement.

But Nanyang Technological University (NTU), represented by a team of six undergraduates, bagged the top prize - in only its second time participating in the competition held in the United States from Nov 13 to 15.

It beat 15 others from around the world, including top universities like Georgia Institute of Technology, Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University and China's Tsinghua University.

The team from NTU's School of Computer Science and Engineering had to configure a high-performance computing (HPC) system that can understand and process complex scientific applications that were issued to them in mid-August.

For instance, the system may need to run applications that can detect oil and gas in the sea, or analyse a given sequence of DNA, which can take between eight and more than 30 hours to process.

But the team had only 48 hours during the conference to build their system and run the applications.

When the competition started on Nov 13 in Denver, Colorado, the teams worked feverishly round the clock to configure HPC systems that would allow four applications to run smoothly and efficiently.

While the HPC systems they built were not supercomputers - which refers to a system that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers - they do draw on the same HPC technology.

The NTU team adviser, Associate Professor Francis Lee, said the students employed a maverick strategy by packing more computing power into fewer individual computers in the cluster, known as nodes in a HPC system.

While most teams used only eight graphic processing units, the NTU team used twice the number, but packed them densely into just two nodes.

This was because the team could get access to more graphic processing units, sponsored by technology firm Nvidia Singapore.

The students also consulted domain experts to better understand the science behind the applications.

Among other things, judges appraised them on their presentation skills and how well they understood and executed the application software.

National Tsing Hua University and Tsinghua University were placed second and third respectively.

Last year, NTU also entered a team for the SCC competition, which has been running since 2007.

This year's team was also sponsored by the National Supercomputing Centre Singapore (NSCC).

NSCC deputy director Jon Lau said of the team's win: "With this achievement, we have shown that Singapore is on track towards building strong HPC competencies among our institutions of higher learning."

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on November 23, 2017, with the headline NTU takes top spot in US supercomputing challenge. Subscribe