A PolyU team garnered two awards among over 300 teams from universities worldwide at the 2024 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge Finals held in Mainland China in April. The team members included Mr ZHANG Haolin, Mr BAO Yucheng, Mr CHEN Junru and Mr SUN Hansong, undergraduates from the Department of Computing, and Mr ZHAO Qingsen, undergraduate from the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology. Dr SHI Jieming, Assistant Professor, Mr ZHANG, and Mr FU Guanhe from the Department of Computing were the advisor, leader and observer of the team, respectively.

As one of the 25 finalist teams advancing to the finals, the PolyU team received the First Prize. In the finals, all the contestants were randomly divided into five groups, each with representatives from five universities. The PolyU team collaborated with four universities in Mainland China and shared the Group Competition Award with them.

The PolyU team designed their clusters, optimised a computational model that can perform language generation or natural language processing tasks, and tackled an oil extraction challenge that demanded interdisciplinary expertise. Their efforts included cracking an undocumented programming language project, understanding its components and underlying mathematical operations, and ultimately enhancing its performance.

The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge was initiated by the Asia Supercomputer Community and is supported by Asian, European, and American experts and institutions.