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What do we know about GPUs? Tianhe-1A lives at our school
China's NUDT team brings hybrid power to Hamburg
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 to lock down their ticket to the ISC 2012 Student Cluster Challenge in Hamburg.
NUDT (profile here) 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.
Will the power of the GPU vault them over other competitors into the top spot this year? We’ll know soon. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
