BEIJING, Jan. 13 (Xinhua) -- More than 300 teams around the world have signed up to participate in the ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC20), according to the organizing committee of the ASC20.
The launch ceremony of the ASC20 was held in Beijing on Friday.
The preliminaries started on Jan. 6 and will be concluded on Feb. 28. The finals will be held at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province from April 25 to 29, said the organizing committee.
The competition includes using classical supercomputers to complete quantum computing simulations and training artificial intelligence (AI) models to complete English test questions, according to Inspur Group, China's leading cloud computing, big data service provider as well as the sponsor of the ASC20.
Quantum computers are regarded as the next-generation computing devices with the most potential. However, the development of quantum computers is slow due to the characteristics of quantum. It is difficult for scientists to use real quantum computers to conduct more in-depth researches on major issues such as particle physics modeling, cryptography, genetic engineering and quantum machine learning.
The ASC20 set up a cutting-edge quantum computing competition for the first time. It is important to use classical supercomputers to complete quantum computation simulation for studying new algorithms and architectures, said Inspur Group.
The ASC20 will also hold a special English test. All the teams will train their AI models on the English cloze test data provided by the organizing committee. The AI models will then take the exam and try to get the highest scores possible.
Teaching machines to understand human languages is one of the most elusive and long-standing challenges in the field of AI. The ASC20 AI competition uses human-oriented tasks to evaluate the performance of neural networks, which is quite challenging, according to the the organizing committee.
The main objectives of the ASC20 are to encourage the exchange and training of young supercomputing talent from different countries, improve supercomputing applications and R&D capacity, boost the development of supercomputing and promote technical and industrial innovation, said Wang Endong, chief scientist of Inspur Group.
The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge is the world's largest supercomputing contest for college students initiated by China. It has been held nine times so far, attracting more than 8,500 college students from all over the world.
