Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University once again claimed first place in the student cluster competition at the annual SC International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC’11) in Seattle, using server hardware from Acer. The team produced outstanding results in a wealth of clustered computing tests and benchmarks designed to achieve optimal performance using x86-based computer hardware.
Evis Lin, associate vice president of Acer’s Enterprise Products business unit, gave credit to the team, “Our professional line of enterprise-class products strive to provide users with the latest technology in a package that fits their needs. Acer takes great pride in being a part of Tsing Hua University’s achievements, and looks forward to even more exciting developments from the school in the future.”
National Tsing Hua University has a long standing tradition in the field of parallel computing, and has been an active participant in the competition for the past five years of its existence. Following months of preparation, the team, led by Professor Yeh-Ching Chung and Professor Che-Rung Lee, worked with Acer, NVIDIA, and Taiwan’s National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) to practice and learn about performance optimization on the latest hardware systems. Their final configuration used Acer’s high-density Gemini systems with NVIDIA® Tesla™ C2070 GPUs to achieve over 1.8 TFLOPS across six systems and using a power budget of under 5.7kW.
Regarding the team’s performance, Professor Chung replied, “We are pleased to have recaptured the first place title again. Through the dedication of the team and assistance from our sponsors, especially Acer and NVIDIA, we have once again proven that Taiwan can truly perform in high-performance computing. Furthermore, we wish to express our gratitude toward NCHC’s efforts in educating high performance computing in Taiwan.”
NCHC’s director, Kuo-Ning Chiang, also expressed his gratification in the Taiwan team’s success in winning the SCC World Series championship.
“The success of the team on NVIDIA Tesla GPUs highlights the robust performance, energy-efficiency and applicability that GPUs bring to the HPC space,” said Sumit Gupta, manager of NVIDIA’S Tesla business unit. “Through their great efforts and the collaboration between Acer, NCHC and NVIDIA, the team was able to achieve some really fantastic performance numbers in this competition.”
