HPC-AI Advisory Council announces 5th annual APAC HPC-AI Competition

The HPC-AI Advisory Council, National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore and National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) Australia have launched the 5th iteration of the regional APAC HPC-AI student competition. 

The annual competition spans six months and hosts graduate, advanced degree and undergraduate students from across the APAC region to develop their skillsets and challenge their understanding of high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

The 2022 APAC HPC-AI Competition will see hundreds of students representing 22 teams from 12 countries and regions in APAC vying to become the best team. This year’s competition includes tasks and challenges focusing on three of the hottest research topics and mission critical issues. Contestants will need to leverage the power of HPC and AI technologies to find solutions that improve human health and sustainability of our planet’s resources and environment. 

The topics include developing future green energy mechanisms using HPC technology; analysing and training satellite data with AI technology for better climate modelling and weather forecasting, and using deep learning technology to perform DNA sequence fast decoding for enhanced disease prevention and medical care.

Specific tasks of the 2022 competition include:

The HPC Task – Quantum ESPRESSO. Hydrogen is considered as a promising and sustainable solution for future energy storage and despatch. Quantum ESPRESSO can be used to simulate hydrogen separation through thermochemical water splitting.

The AI Task – Dask. Data science, such as extract, transform, load (ETL), machine learning (ML) and graph analytics, leverage high-level programming languages to accelerate Dask performance in distributed CPU and GPU systems. Teams will focus on OpenUCX-based Dask-CUDA to provide increased performance and scalability in a GPU cluster.

The Innovation Task – Deep learning-based DNA sequence fast decoding. Transcription factors (TF) play a key role in gene expression regulation. Teams will use deep learning-based AI models to decode the transcription factor binding sites in high resolution to better understand transcription factors’ regulatory mechanisms.

The HPC-AI Advisory Council, NSCC Singapore and NCI Australia will provide support in the form of HPC and AI fundamental education and competition task training for all participants. Additionally, NSCC Singapore and NCI Australia will provide the CPU and GPU clusters from their HPC centres for all teams to develop and test their code.

“The APAC HPC-AI competition has become a tremendous annual event, bringing hundreds of students from all over the APAC region together to build upon their HPC and AI fundamentals and work on important tasks that are critical to the world,” said Gilad Shainer, Chairman of the HPC-AI Advisory Council. 

“We wish the students great success in their coming accomplishments and thank NSCC Singapore and NCI Australia for their supercomputing resource support, education and training.”

“The human health and environment related tasks of the 2022 competition are especially relevant to the APAC region that hosts some 60% of the world’s population. The annual HPC-AI Competition is a crucial training ground that nurtures the next generation of HPC and AI professionals, and prepares them to meet such challenges head on,” said Associate Professor Tan Tin Wee, Chief Executive of NSCC Singapore.

“Our collaboration with the HPC-AI Advisory Council and our close partners from NCI Australia will help accelerate the advancement of HPC and AI skillsets of the region’s student communities.”

“The HPC-AI Competition exposes students to real-world disciplines and encourages new ways of thinking and tackling problems,” added Dr Jingbo Wang, Manager of Training and Research Engagement at NCI Australia. 

“We look forward to an exciting, educational competition, and sincerely thank the HPC-AI Advisory Council for their tremendous collaboration in helping cultivate the region’s talent pool of HPC and AI experts.”

The winning teams will be announced in November 2022 followed by an official award ceremony to celebrate all the competitors at the annual SupercomputingAsia 2023 conference, to be held in Singapore from 28 February – 2 March 2023.