In 2013 in Shanghai, the ASC competition went out of Asia and into the world for the first time. And now that we are back in Shanghai, we are back to a new starting point.
Now, after 12 years of development, the ASC competition has indeed become one of the three major international supercomputing competitions for college students, along with the SC of the United States and the ISC of Germany, and even in terms of scale and influence, the ASC competition has become the undoubted number one in the world. The ancients called the 12-year cycle "one era", and the development of ASC to this day has just completed the cycle of one era, which is also in line with the theme of this year's competition - new starting point, new connection, new challenge.
After 12 years of reincarnation, the ASC competition started again
Twelve years ago, there were only 27 teams participating in the first ASC competition, but today that number has grown to 359, which is also a new record in the history of the ASC competition. Yes, almost every year, the number of teams participating in the ASC competition has increased completely, which means that the influence of the competition continues to expand – more and more teams from all over the world are participating in the competition, both online and offline, and it is also facilitating a wider range of exchanges.
In order to allow more universities, more teachers and students to participate in the competition and better enjoy the competition, the ASC24 organizing committee also held a competition training camp for the participating teachers and students, inviting experts from well-known domestic universities and research institutions to explain in detail the ASC competition rules, cluster construction and optimization, parallel program design, AI language model and other knowledge, introduce the competition problems and solution ideas, and invite the previous ASC winning teams to share their preparation experience.
Of course, the organizer of the competition every year will also attract everyone's attention, and this year's final venue is Shanghai University. Shanghai University is a comprehensive research university in Shanghai, a university jointly established by the Ministry of Education and the people of Shanghai, a key university under the national "211 Project", a high-level local university in Shanghai, and a national "double first-class" university. In order to welcome this ASC competition, Shanghai University is going all out.
The school attaches great importance to this ASC competition and has done a lot of preparatory work, such as organizing a delegation to visit the University of Science and Technology of China, the organizer of the previous competition, to learn from their successful experience in organizing the competition, and having many discussions with the representatives of the organizing committee to gain an in-depth understanding of the requirements of the competition, power demand, finance, security, logistics support, personnel reception, etc.", when talking about the complex preparations for the competition, Xie Shaorong, dean of the School of Computer Engineering and Science of Shanghai University, can be described as a treasure.
It should be said that from the organizing committee of the ASC competition to Shanghai University, they are full of expectations for the ASC24 competition itself. Everyone praised the long-term efforts of the ASC competition in promoting the development of supercomputing applications and promoting the cultivation of supercomputing talents, and at the same time, everyone's appearance also illustrated the profound influence of the competition itself, for example, as a representative of the instructor, Mr. Fu Zhenxin was once a member of the Peking University team, and now he has taken on the important task of talent training and technology inheritance.
Keeping up with the development of the industry, the large-scale model and the scientific research competition are two-pronged
From the first competition to today, the biggest feature of the ASC competition is to keep up with the times, whether it is the artificial intelligence competition problem or the current large model optimization application, they are at the forefront of industry applications, allowing students to witness the latest IT technology at the same time, but also providing them with targeted solution training, such as the big prediction model optimization reasoning and seepage numerical simulation in this competition The two competition problems are quite representative.
The application of large models is the theme of the past 2023, and generative AI has become a hot topic in the industry this year, according to incomplete statistics, there are hundreds of large models of various brands, and the industry applications are even more diverse. With the rapid progress of large model training and development and the gradual implementation of applications, the optimization of large model inference performance and cost has been highly valued by the industry.
This competition requires the participating teams to build and optimize an inference engine based on the popular open-source large language model llama2 to achieve high-throughput inference processing on the sample dataset provided by the organizing committee. The competition requires the use of the largest parameter scale of the model of 70 billion, and the participating teams need to fully understand and master the common parallel methods of large models, and learn to use various techniques to optimize the inference process.
We will arrange relevant researchers to explain the basic knowledge ...... of large models to the participating teamsBecause this is a very cutting-edge technology, it may involve what are the most difficult points in optimizing the transformer architecture, and what are the concerns of the industry, which can reduce their exploration time, and it is also a necessary guide," said Zhou Hua, head of large model industry application at KLCII, when talking about how to make it easier for players to get started with competition training.
In the view of the ASC Organizing Committee, this kind of global competition needs to test the ability of the participants to react on the spot and work together, and through basic training, the team members can better understand the work and achieve better optimization results. "Our purpose is to test how the participating teams can more effectively obtain relevant resources and help us optimize the large model, which is why we chose LLAMA2-70B as the competition topic this year," said Liu Jun, a member of the ASC Organizing Committee.
Compared with the popular large model, the other seepage numerical simulation problem focuses more on scientific training. The competition requires each team to simulate the seepage of oil, gas, water and other multiphase fluids in oil extraction scenarios, and optimize the large-scale parallel computing process to improve the computing performance and parallel efficiency of the discrete algorithm. Compared with the well-known application of large models, this question focuses more on the assessment of basic theories and technologies, and naturally has higher requirements for the participants.
Seepage mechanics is an interdisciplinary discipline, and it is also a strong interdisciplinary discipline involving reservoir engineering, geomechanics, fluid mechanics, computer science, and applied mathematics", Zhang Chensong, a researcher at the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said, "Our topic is mainly to hope that students can see the application of numerical algorithms in industrial applications, and then optimize them, form documents or help." We hope to give students a scenario of industrial application and give full play to their ingenuity."
Although the topic seems to be very big, the organizing committee still considerately shields and chooses some esoteric content, and what they need to do for the participating team members is to optimize the ** to the greatest extent, so that the work that may take days or even dozens of days can be compressed to the hour or even minute level to be completed to the greatest extent. This is still quite challenging for the team members, but once the optimization is successful, it can even guide the real business and really apply it to production.
That's the biggest advantage of the ASC competition. Different from other competitions, the questions of the ASC competition every year are from real production and life, and the optimization results may also change the actual production and life. In previous competitions, there have been many optimizations for cryo-EM, radio telescopes, autonomous driving and other topics, and later these optimization results have also affected practical applications and made certain contributions to scientific research and industry.
After 12 years of development, the ASC competition has already become internationally famous and fruitful. As Nie Qing, vice president of Shanghai University, the host of the ASC24 finals, said, it is hoped that by holding the ASC competition, more young talents will be provided with a broader stage for scientific and technological exchanges, exposed to more cutting-edge technologies and applications, and cultivate their teamwork ability, innovation consciousness and practical ability, so as to further promote learning, teaching and research through competition.