ASC26 in Wuxi: my part was the infrastructure

We came out of the ASC26 Global Finals in Wuxi, China, as group competition winner. I went as the team's HPC Infrastructure Lead, and my part was the machines: I set up the competition infrastructure and installed the ROCm drivers for the graphics cards.

ASC26 is the Student Supercomputer Challenge, an international supercomputing competition for student teams. I traveled to Wuxi with my team in May 2026 for the Global Finals, and the first thing on my list was the infrastructure. The drivers went on after that, once the machines were up.

ROCm, AMD's driver stack for its GPUs, had to go on before the cards could run anything, so the driver install was its own piece of work, separate from setting up the machines.

The team worked on ICON, a scientific application used for global weather and climate forecasting. Together with teams from four international universities, the team optimized ICON's inference time. That optimization was team work. My part in it was the infrastructure and the drivers.

The team also ran the HPL and HPCG benchmarks, and HPL reached about 78% of Rpeak, the system's theoretical peak. That number is a team result too.

The result was group competition winner, and I have the physical diploma and the trophy.

By the time of the finals I was working as a Supercomputing Research Assistant at APOLO, and ICON shows up there too. Part of my job was technical support for compiling and integrating scientific applications on the clusters, which means getting an application to build on the cluster and run there for the people who need it. ICON was one of them, next to R and ORCA.

So I've worked around the same application twice, in two very different settings: a production cluster and an international student competition in Wuxi. Both times I was on the infrastructure side. My job was getting the machine ready for the application and for the people working on it.