Intel injects talent into high-performance computing application innovation and practice

Ten years of dream building and moving towards the new: Intel injects talent power into the innovation and practice of high-performance computing applications

June 25, 2022, Beijing - Today, the 10th "Intel" Cup National Parallel Application Challenge (PAC 2022) was officially launched in Beijing , under the guidance of the High Performance Computing Professional Committee of the China Computer Society, and organized by Intel China and Parallel Technology. Dr. Song Jiqiang, Vice President of Intel Research Institute and Director of Intel China Research Institute, was invited to attend the launch ceremony and delivered a speech. During the period, Intel not only announced that it will provide a high-performance GPU development platform based on Intel® Xe-HP microarchitecture as the competition platform for the first time, but also will establish a new oneAPI Technology Application Award to encourage participants to use heterogeneous computing programming languages ​​and tools based on open industrial standards, aiming to reserve talent for the high-performance computing industry by pre-positioning leading product technologies to the talent link of universities.

Zheng Weimin, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and honorary chairman of the competition steering committee, delivered a speech, pointing out that in addition to laying a solid theoretical foundation through course learning, practice is also essential for cultivating high-performance computing talents, and participating in the PAC competition can greatly improve the system capabilities of the contestants. I am very happy to witness and accompany the PAC competition through its tenth anniversary, and I hope that the future competition will bring more benefits to the industry and contestants.

Sun Ninghui, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and co-chair of the competition steering committee, said that thanks to the competition's theme setting that keeps pace with the times and constantly changes to suit the needs of the times, as well as the continuous investment of companies such as Intel, the PAC competition has successfully been with everyone for ten years. I believe that as long as our love and passion for parallel computing remain unabated, the competition can continue to move forward and create more value for society.

At the same time, Dr. Song Jiqiang, Vice President of Intel Research Institute and Director of Intel China Research Institute, said in his speech that looking back at the past ten years, as cloud computing and edge computing were included in the scope of parallel computing, parallel computing has developed rapidly. Talent is the "power source" of industry development. Standing at the new starting point of the PAC competition for ten years, Intel will not forget its original intention of "helping contestants and accelerating practitioners", and will use leading product technologies to help cultivate high-performance computing talents and provide vitality for the industry; at the same time, it will also help cross-field industry competitions to jointly cultivate and create compound talents, and respond to real-world challenges with more application results with international influence.

In order to fundamentally accelerate the development of the high-performance computing field and help cultivate compound talents in the industry, Intel has been providing hardware platforms, software tools and related training for the "Intel Cup" National Parallel Application Challenge (PAC) as a co-organizer since 2013. This year, Intel has built a high-performance computing software development platform based on Intel® Xe-HP GPU for the PAC competition. The platform has high-density computing devices and ultra-high-bandwidth HBM2e memory, and uses PCle Gen4 adapter cards and GPU accelerators that support flexible deployment to provide competition support for contestants. At the same time, Intel will continue to provide an open and standard-based unified software stack oneAPI, which aims to liberate the original private programming model, help contestants more efficiently use CPU, GPU and other acceleration hardware and achieve cross-architecture performance portability.

After ten years of intensive cultivation and development, the "Intel Cup" National Parallel Application Challenge has become a leading challenge in the field of high-performance computing in my country. So far, the competition has successfully attracted more than 1,500 teams from more than 40 cities, more than 400 universities and units in China to participate, with a total of more than 13,000 direct participants. Among them, the Hongyan team from USTC won the world's highest award in the group over 18 years old at the Intel Global Artificial Intelligence Influence Carnival held last year with its award-winning project "Cancer Radiation AI Assisted System-Radioseg" in PAC 2019. Thanks to Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and OpenVINO, Radioseg can provide inference speeds that meet actual needs in practice, which not only greatly reduces the workload for doctors, but also provides more accurate treatment for cancer patients, while reducing medical costs and improving the utilization of medical resources.

In addition to its long-term efforts in talent cultivation, Intel has also been accelerating the implementation of high-performance computing applications by promoting product technology innovation. At this stage, Intel has joined hands with a number of ecological partners to create diversified solutions for different vertical fields such as engineering manufacturing, weather forecasting, drug development, geological exploration, etc. with a leading and comprehensive product portfolio. In the future, Intel will not only continue to significantly improve its high-performance computing capabilities driven by the "four super technology forces" - ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous connectivity, infrastructure from cloud to edge, and artificial intelligence, but will also further cooperate closely with industry, academia, and research to combine theory with practice, cultivate professional compound talents for the industry, help create more sustainable and open high-performance computing, and unlock new opportunities in the field of high-performance computing.