Peking University, April 21, 2024: A team from Peking University (PKU) has emerged as defending champions of the ASC 24 Student Supercomputer Challenge, which closed its final stage at Shanghai University recently. The largest supercomputing competition in the world, ASC 24 was participated by more than 300 universities from around the world, with 25 qualifying for the final stage.

The final stage required each team to design and build their own supercomputing system under the power consumption constraint of 3000W, and focused on cutting-edge scientific fields such as AI language models, GoMars, and more. The PKU team participating in this year's competition consisted of teachers and students from the School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering, and other disciplines relevant to supercomputing.


During the final stage, the PKU team first encountered WannierTools, a new and non-trivial electronic structure calculation software for materials. The team excelled at the task and made an innovative move by conducting application structure and performance bottleneck analysis, in addition to utilizing GPU acceleration, which significantly reduced the running time of related applications. 

Not only that, the team also delivered excellent performance by demonstrating a comprehensive and profound understanding of supercomputing systems and applications in computational software for non-trivial electronic structures of novel materials, acceleration of reasoning for large language models, and the use of GoMars. Their remarkable performance optimization, outstanding teamwork, and on-field play helped them secure their title as reigning champions.


The PKU supercomputing team has consistently surpassed numerous milestones over the years. With their passionate and enterprising attitude, they have achieved consecutive victories, including championship titles in the 10th and 11th ASC, as well as the highest performance award in the LINPACK Benchmarking Tests at the SC23 International Supercomputing Competition for University Students. These achievements fully exemplify the spirit of PKU students, who are unwavering in their commitment to innovation and the pursuit of excellence.

Written by: Teo Si Min
Edited by: Yang Ruoxiang
Source: PKU News (Chinese)