To foster international exchange in the areas of
high-performance computer (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), the National
Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore and the HPC AI Advisory Council opened
the 2018 APAC HPC-AI
Competition for registration.
The competition is open to university and technical institute teams from the entire APAC region, and includes both creating missions and addressing challenges around AI development and testing, and high-performance computing workloads.
Established in 2015, NSCC
Singapore manages Singapore’s first national petascale facility with
available HPC resources to support science and engineering computing needs for
academic, research and industry communities.
Funded by its stakeholders, including Agency for Science
Technology and Research (A*STAR), Nanyang Technological University (NTU),
National University of Singapore (NUS), and Singapore University of Technology
and Design (SUTD), with substantial funding from Ministry of Trade and
Industry, NSCC’s vision is to democratise access to supercomputing, and is
catalytic in supporting national research and development initiatives,
attracting industrial research collaborations and enhancing Singapore’s
research capabilities.
The HPC
Advisory Council mission is
to bridge the gap between HPC use and its potential, bring the beneficial
capabilities of HPC to new users for better research, education, innovation and
product manufacturing, bring users the expertise needed to operate HPC systems,
provide application designers with the tools needed to enable parallel
computing, and to strengthen the qualification and integration of HPC system
products.
The APAC HPC-AI
competition encourages international teams in the APAC region to
showcase their HPC and AI expertise through a competition that builds critical
skills, professional relationships, competitive spirits and lifelong
comraderies.
AI is a pillar of today’s technological world, offering
solutions that enable better and more accurate decisions based on the massive
amounts of data being collected. It encompasses a wide range of trends and use
cases that apply to nearly every industry today, ranging from security,
finance, and image and voice recognition, to self-driving cars and smart
cities.
HPC enables universities, research laboratories and
commercial vendors to develop the products and services of tomorrow – from
safer cars and airplanes, to accurate weather and storm prediction, to finding
new cures, and much more.
Since HPC and AI applications share the same underlying
technologies and infrastructures, new developments in HPC are immediately being
adopted for AI, and vice versa.
The target of this competition is to improve and enhance the
performance of TensorFlow and/or Caffe2 distributed training implementation
over RDMA and GPUDirect technologies.
TensorFlow is
an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow
graphs. TensorFlow 1.5 supports RDMA and GPUDirect to accelerate distributed
training.
Caffe is
a deep learning framework made with expression, speed, and modularity in mind.
It is developed by Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) and by community contributors.
Caffe2 adds support for RDMA.
The winning team will be invited to participate in the 2019
International HPC-ISC Student Cluster Competition, to be held in Germany, June
2019.
The competition will
start on March 27, 2018
and continue through until August 2018.
Registration
for the competition will close on March 23, 2018.
