Recently, the finals of the 13th ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC26) were held in Jiangsu Province. Competing against some of the world’s top university teams with comparatively limited hardware resources, the Zhejiang University supercomputing team demonstrated exceptional technical expertise and resilience, earning a First Prize and successfully defending its Application Innovation Award title (awarded for the highest application performance in a single challenge). The team ultimately ranked fifth overall worldwide.
The Zhejiang University team consisted of five undergraduate students: Hong Yixun (team captain), Liu Ye, Liu Tianyang, Jing Chun from the College of Computer Science and Technology, and Ye Nacheng from the School of Mathematical Sciences. Professors Chen Jianhai and Wang Zeke led the team onsite, with guidance from Professors Zhang Yin, He Shuibing, Zhuang Bohan, Zhao Binbin, and others. The team adopted a “five-node, nine-GPU” configuration (1× H100, 4× A100, and 4× W7900D), giving them the fewest advanced computing resources among the leading teams. Despite the hardware disadvantage, the students achieved remarkable results through innovative system architecture design and optimization, successfully tackling demanding tasks such as world-model inference optimization, numerical relativity simulations for gravitational waves, and quantum circuit simulation.
In the gravitational-wave numerical simulation challenge in particular, the team started from incomplete GPU code and independently developed more than 60 CUDA kernels along with a complete GPU runtime system. Through extensive system-level optimizations—including memory management, optimized memory layouts, shared-memory differential tiling, and communication pipelining—they achieved the highest application performance in the world for the challenge, securing the Application Innovation Award.
In addition, Zhejiang University sent 21 observer team members to the finals for onsite learning and communicating with top international teams, helping strengthen the program’s future talent pipeline.
Since its establishment in 2014, the Zhejiang University supercomputing team has achieved outstanding results in leading international competitions such as ASC, ISC, SC, and IndySCC. To date, the team has won nine ASC First Prizes and claimed the IndySCC global championship twice. Beyond competition success, the team has consistently promoted the integration of industry, academia, and research, while applying competition-driven innovations to scientific research and campus services.
