Shanghai, April 19 (CNA) Beijing-based Tsinghua University won Friday the first Asia Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC) held earlier this month, while Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University finished second.
The two teams were the best of the 40 teams -- 30 from China and 10 from overseas -- competing in the event, recognized as one of three major supercomputer contests around the world.
The Chinese team won the title with 81.72 points, followed by the Taiwanese team, with 62.28 points.
It was the first time that the two universities with the same name had competed against each other in a supercomputing competition.
Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University is a two-time winner of the Student Cluster Competition (SCC), held each year in the United States for student teams from around the world and reputed to be the most prestigious international supercomputing contest.
Beijing-based Tsinghua University won the title last year at the annual International Supercomputing Conference and Exhibition (ISC) in Leipzig, Germany.
Jubilant Taiwanese team leader Wang Ying-chieh said National Tsing Hua University will send a team to compete in the SCC in November, adding that she was in the university team that took part in the 2011 SCC. Her team won the 2011 SCC contest, while China's National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), based in Changsha, capital of central China's Hunan Province, was the runner-up.
The event organizer said that Beijing-based Tsinghua University's victory was mainly based on its achievements in the first phase of the contest, titled "High Performance Linpack" with a world record of 7,579 GFlOPS. Previously, the highest score in any contests was less than 4,000 GFlOPS.
The speed of a computer processor can be expressed in the unit FlOPS, or floating point operations per second. One billion FLOPS is called GFLOPS or gigaFLOPS. A FLOPS calculation is a measure of the number-crunching capability of the processor. LINPACK is one of the standard benchmarks for measuring processor speed using FLOPS.
(By Cheng Chung-sheng and Y.L. Kao)
Students from Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University and Beijing-based Tsinghua University