The HPC-AI Advisory Council, the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore and NCI Australia announced the winners of the sixth Asia-Pacific HPC-AI Student Competition. The six-month-long competition allowed student teams to develop skills in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) while driving better application performance for the pressing global problems of climate and large language models.
Gilad Shainer, Chairman of the HPC-AI Advisory Council, said, “HPC and AI stand as the indispensable forces propelling scientific and human progress forward, and advanced communication programming plays a pivotal role in empowering large-scale HPC and AI clusters.”
NCI Director Professor Sean Smith said, “Through our dedication to advancing computational research and fostering regional collaboration, NCI Australia continues to be a cornerstone of support for the growth and success of the APAC HPC-AI competition, driving innovation and excellence in the field of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.”
The two competition tasks were:
- Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) is a collaborative project for developing atmosphere, ocean and other earth-system simulation components for use in climate, regional climate and weather studies. Global climate anomalies have become the focus of research. The target of this HPC competition is to improve the performance of MPAS to provide better service for humans.
- BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model (BLOOM) is the first multilingual Large Language Model (LLM). With its 176 billion parameters, BLOOM can generate text in 46 natural and 13 programming languages. Using the AI cluster to provide the distributed inference service has become the trend for BLOOM and similar large models.
NCI Australia and NSCC Singapore provided all teams with state-of-the-art HPC and AI supercomputer resources and support for practising their creative ideas. To further enrich the experience, the HPC-AI Advisory Council invited industry leaders for each task to help train on the fundamental technologies.
The Monash University team member Simon Michnowicz said, “Monash University is honoured to co-share the merit award in the 6th APAC HPC-AI Competition. This contest motivated and challenged the students to learn about HPC and its power to tackle global challenges. Besides gaining access to some of the largest computer systems in the world, NSCC Singapore and NCI Australia, our team gained valuable experience in teamwork and scientific programming through training by international experts in the field. We thank the HPC-AI Advisory Council for the opportunity to participate and all those who helped us along this journey as the Monash DeepNeuron Student Team and Monash eResearch Centre.”
The publication of the results occurred at the Supercomputing Conference in Denver, USA. The award ceremony will happen at the Supercomputing Asia conference in Sidney in February 2024.
The prize-winners were:
First place – National Tsing Hua University ZY team
Second place – Nanyang Technological University Neutron team and Southern University of Science and Technology team
Third place – National Tsing Hua University SJ team, Nanyang Technological University Nebula team and National Cheng Kung University team
Merit place: The Monash University team, The Thammasat University Lampang team, The Kasetsart University team, The Universiti Putra Malaysia team and The Lanzhou University team
Best HPC performance: The Nanyang Technological University Neutron team
Best AI performance: The National Cheng Kung University team
