ASC20-21 Student Supercomputer Challenge Announce AWS Support

The 2020-2021 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC20-21) announced support from Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS provides the online cloud platform for ASC20-21 Virtual Student Supercomputer Challenge.

The ASC20-21 Student Supercomputer Challenge has attracted over 300 university teams from around the world, and 28 teams have advanced to the finals. They include Monash University, University of Warsaw, Tsinghua University, and University of Science and Technology of China. For the first time the finals include both on-site and virtual participations: From May 8 to 12, the Top21 teams from the Chinese mainland joined the finals on-site at Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. The Top 7 teams outside of the Chinese mainland participated online using the AWS as their cloud computing platform. All teams faced challenging tasks, including pulsar search, language exam, quantum computing simulation, high performance benchmarks HPL & HPCG, group competition, and a mystery application.

Vangel Bojaxhi, Executive Director of Asia Supercomputer Community and member of ASC20-21 Organizing Committee, said, "ASC is thrilled to have the AWS sponsorship for this year's Student Supercomputer Challenge. AWS provides the largest public cloud platform to young talents from all over the world to compete on challenging tasks in astronomy, AI, quantum computing, and other frontier applications. They are making this event memorable to the Asia Supercomputer Community and supercomputing enthusiasts at large. We are glad to see that AWS public cloud and ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge, being both the world's largest in their respective categories, are joining forces to deliver such an exciting event".

Ian Colle from AWS said, "Millions of AWS users are benefiting from the rapid AWS Cloud innovations every day, and now our state-of-the-art HPC solutions will be delivered through the ASC competition, putting students in a better position to develop their talents, and embark in new explorations in the world of science and technology. We genuinely believe it is an important, and highly anticipated opportunity for both sides."

About ASC

The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge is the world's largest student supercomputer competition, sponsored and organized by Asia Supercomputer Community and supported by Asian, European, and American experts and institutions. The main objectives of ASC are to encourage exchange and training of young supercomputing talent from different countries, improve supercomputing applications and R&D capacity, boost the development of supercomputing, and promote technical and industrial innovation. The first ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge was held in 2012 and since has attracted nearly 10,000 undergraduates from all over the world. The ASC20-21 Student Supercomputer Challenge is jointly organized by Asia Supercomputer Community and Southern University of Science and Technology. Learn more for ASC at http://asc-events.org/.

About AWS:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers?including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies?are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

AWS provides the most elastic and scalable cloud infrastructure to run your HPC applications. With virtually unlimited capacity, engineers, researchers, and HPC system owners can innovate beyond the limitations of on-premises HPC infrastructure. AWS delivers an integrated suite of services that provides everything needed to quickly and easily build and manage HPC clusters in the cloud to run the most compute intensive workloads across various industry verticals. To learn more about running HPC workloads on AWS, please visit this page.