What I Gained From the 2022 APAC HPC-AI Competition

The 2022 APAC HPC AI Competition have just finished, which took 7 months from the beginning training to the final presentation.

Here is a review about what I got from participating in the competition:

• Leadership

  Being the captain of the Team NCKU, my role was a “buffer” between the competition organizer and our teammates.

• Confidence in speaking English

  My past experiences of speaking English were bad. The most occasions where I had to speak English were interviews. I had to express myself in English, but most of the time I just stuck there and struggle with how I could turn my thought into words thus lost the opportunities.

  When I was preparing for the final presentation of the HPC-AI Competition, I wrote down most the speech I planned to say word by word to avoid that I would stuck during the presentation and make it awkward. During the presentation, I surprisingly found that most of the time my mind could naturally generate words to say without the notes. I felt that I was speaking English much more fluently than before. I could also understand all that the judges said and have a clear conversation with them. After the presentation, I gained much confidence in speaking English. This will surely be very beneficial to my career.

• HPC skills

  In my high school times, I loved deep learning, but I didn’t know that HPC was a thing. From the training sessions and the opportunity to access supercomputers in the competition, I learnt how people train their models across mutiple GPUs or mutiple machines. In my current job related to deep learning, I use the Tainwania II supercomputer and apply data-parrallel to my training code without pain, thanks to the previous experiences gained in the competition.

Actually I felt I didn’t learn enough w.r.t the time I spent in the competition (for the competition my 2 other projects was suspended for months). However, the things I learned was indeed useful for my career.