SuperCon 2024 — 30th Supercomputing Contest held for high school and technical college students
Tokyo Tech's* Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC), Osaka University's Cybermedia Center (CMC), and the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) hosted the 2024 Supercomputing Contest (SuperCon 2024) for high school and technical college students from August 19 to 23. This year's contest was the thirtieth of its kind.
During SuperCon, teams of two to three students from high schools or technical colleges attempt to solve challenging problems using a supercomputer. With a focus on both accuracy and speed, the teams have four days to create programs that address these problems.
This year’s contest was held online using SQUID, the supercomputer at Osaka University. The finals included 20 teams — 54 participants from 17 schools — who had won in the preliminary rounds.
Problem: Firefighting forest fire on island
The main question in this year’s finals was based on a simulation of firefighting a forest fire on an island. The “firefighters” could only cut down unburned trees to prevent the fire from spreading. The task was to determine the density of trees to be felled so that the sum of the densities of unburned trees (S) would be as large as possible after a certain period of time had elapsed. When creating their programs, participants used vector processors with the aim of increasing the speed of calculations.
Results and closing ceremony
Results were announced in conjunction with the closing ceremony on August 23, where joint organizers made remarks on the participants’ efforts. In addition to feedback from Tokyo Tech Provost and Executive Vice President for Institute Strategy Isao Satoh, Tokyo Tech Executive Vice President for Research Initiatives Osamu Watanabe, GSIC Director Toshiya Itoh, and Osaka University President Shojiro Nishio, Sayaka Tohyama from the Information Processing Society of Japan and Kazuhisa Makino from the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers also shared their greetings.
Next, CMC Professor and SuperCon Committee Chair Hajime Yoshino announced the top three teams of the competition. He also offered an explanation and comments of the final problem and solution, and evaluated the work done by the top three student teams.
Note: Organization names and affiliations are accurate as of the time of the event.
SuperCon 2024 winners
1st place: Team Calamari, Senior High School at Komaba, University of Tsukuba
2nd place: Team tcAtCa, Senior High School at Otsuka, University of Tsukuba
3rd place: Team KohakuCH, Chosei High School
Team Calamari was also announced as the recipient of the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award, and the Academic Award from the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, and Information Processing Society of Japan.
- Tokyo Medical and Dental University and Tokyo Institute of Technology merged on October 1, 2024, to form Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo).