The EPCC team of the University of Edinburgh has been awarded first place for the application HPL (High Performance Linpak), used mainly in supercomputers, in the ISC Student Cluster Competition.
The team consists of three Greek students, Emmanuel Farsarakis from Crete, Konstantinos Mouzakitis from Chios, Georgios Iniatis from Cyprus and Chinese student Chenhui Quan.
The team recorded a score of 10.14 Tflops producing 3.38 Tflops/kw which would achieve a rank of #4 in the Green500, a list of the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world.
Emmanuel Farsarakis said that it was a unique and unforgettable experience as they worked really hard and learned a lot of things on new technologies. He also said that unlike their opponents, they were dealing each difficulty with humor that helped them remain calm. Although they had to compete with some of the most well-known universities in the world, such as MIT and Northwestern, they didn’t let anxiety affect them.
According to Farsarakis, supercomputers can have great influence on our daily lives, while high performance computing can play an important role in a variety of fields, such as economics, meteorology, oil companies and the automobile industry. Supercomputers helps us solve problems that would otherwise be impossible to be solved. Supercomputers can be used for the solution of cosmology problems and simulations of cars and aircrafts safety tests.
All team members are currently attending the Master in High Performance Computing at the University of Edinburgh and the EPCC (Edinburgh Parallel Programming Center).
They met at university, although they come from different scientific fields. Farsarakis graduated from the Physics Department of the University of Crete. Mouzakitis and Chenhui Quan graduated from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and the University of Liverpool respectively, while Iniatis studied Informatics at the University of Cyprus.
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