Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/20/isc12_nudt_china_team/
What do we know about GPUs? Tianhe-1A lives at our school
China's NUDT team brings hybrid power to Hamburg
Posted in HPC, 20th June 2012 14:40 GMT
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HPC blog China’s NUDT (National University of Defense Technology) was the first Chinese team to compete at a Student Cluster Competition, making the trek to SC in Seattle in 2010. They came very close to winning the whole competition, finishing a very close second to Taiwan’s Tsinghua University.
They also survived a gruelling intra-China playoff round [1] to lock down their ticket to the ISC 2012 Student Cluster Challenge [2] in Hamburg.
NUDT (profile here [3]) knows a little bit about GPUs. Firstly, their university is the host institution for China’s Tianhe-1A, the 2.56 Petaflop GPU-heavy system that ruled the supercomputing world in 2010. Secondly, several of the students on their Seattle (and Hamburg) team have had hands-on experience with Tianhe-1A and assumedly have had pretty good training when it comes to modifying code to run on GPUs and hybrid systems.
True to form, NUDT has brought a GPU-CPU hybrid system to the Hamburg competition. As they tell me in the accompanying short video clip, GPUs in hybrid systems have become their trademark.
Watch Video [4]
Will the power of the GPU vault them over other competitors into the top spot this year? We’ll know soon. ®