Warsaw Team with high scores on ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge

We are extremely proud of Warsaw Team who received high marks in the finals of ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge 2020-2021. Our students won gold in Machine Learning “Language Exam (LE) Challenge” and bronze in PRESTO application.  Warsaw Team was one of seven foreign teams who took part in the competition’s final virtually and in this on-line category scored first place in benchmark tests twice: HPL with 21.78 TFlops and HPCG with 619.75 GFlops. CONGRATULATION!

The members of Warsaw Team are: Marek Skiba, Patrycja Krzyna, Paweł Pawłowski, (all at University of Warsaw) and Marek Masiak (University College London) and Jan Malinowski (University of Oxford). The team is trained by three staff members of Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM), University of Warsaw: Maciej Szpindler, Marcin Semeniuk, Michał Hermanowicz; and Łukasz Kondraciuk from Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics, and Mechanics Univ. of Warsaw.

The 2020-2021 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC20-21) finals took place from May 8 to 12, 2021. Out of 350 universities (8500+ students) only 28 teams qualified to the finals and had to face several challenging tasks. One of them was pulsar search using the open-source software, PRESTO (PulsaR Exploration and Search Toolkit), and the real observational data gathered by FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope) to search for pulsar signals within the shortest time possible. For more information about the competitive task supported by the National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) follow the link.

During the competition, an AI&HPC Connection Workshop was held with the participation of world renown experts [HPC Wire]. The 26th meeting attended virtually by: Jack Dongarra, ASC Advisory Committee Chair and Distinguished Professor at University of Tennessee; Thomas Sterling, Director of AI Computing Systems Laboratory (AICSL), Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, Bloomington; Marek Michalewicz, Director at Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, University of Warsaw – who initiated creation of Polish representation in SCC competitions to participate around the world.

ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge is the largest supercomputer competition for students, where the number of applying teams exceeds 300, of which 20 to 30 (28 in this edition) go to the strict – 72-hour final. Warsaw Team (WT) was among the few teams that participates in the tournament virtually, together with students from Hong Kong, Colombia, Thailand, Taiwan, Australia and Russia. The other 21 Chinese teams competed on-site at Shenzhen University.

The Top 7 teams outside of the Chinese mainland participated online using the AWS as their cloud computing platform. All teams faced demanding assignments, including pulsar search, language exam, quantum computing simulation, high performance benchmarks HPL & HPCG, group competition, and a mystery application.


The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge is sponsored and organized by Asia Supercomputer Community and supported by Asian, European, and American experts and institutions. The main objectives of ASC are to encourage exchange and training of young supercomputing talents from different countries, to improve supercomputing applications and R&D capacity, to boost the development of supercomputing, and to promote technical and industrial innovations. The first ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge was held in 2012 and since has attracted nearly 10,000 undergraduates from all over the world.