Using NVIDIA Tesla K80s, China’s Tsinghua University team and JMI University in India both took top honors at the popular student contest. At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt, Germany, China’s Tsinghua University team collected their fifth student challenge gold cup (and second ISC win).
The popular student contest brings together university teams from around the world to compete on site for a grueling three days, during which teams must each build a small cluster computer of their own design and run a series of HPC benchmarks and applications. Contest rules specify a strict 3,000W power limit for all equipment that is actively used to run the test codes.
The declared champion, with the highest overall performance, is China’s Tsinghua University team, comprised of Fangrui Song, Yuxin Wu, Yang Zhang, Youwei Zhuo, Dun Liang, and Miao Wang. Sponsored by Chinese server maker Inspur Electronic Information, the students’ hardware platform consisted of an Inspur Yingxin NF5280M4 2U dual-channel rack server, equipped with Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 CPUs and a Tesla K80 GPU, connected with Mellanox EDR fabric.
Highest LINPACK, with a record 10.78 teraflops, went to Jamia Millia Islamia University (New Delhi, India). Using Boston’s liquid cooled GPU cluster, which consists of Tesla K80 GPUs, the team bested the 10.18 teraflops mark previously set by the University of Edinburgh, Boston’s 2014 sponsorship team.