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 2023 Supercomputing Contest (SuperCon 2023) for high school and technical college students from August 21 to 25, 2023. This year's contest was the twenty-ninth 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.
In the past, participating teams gathered at the East Japan site at Tokyo Tech and the West Japan site at Osaka University to engage in the contest finals, but due to health concerns, the 2023 contest was once again conducted online. The finals included 50 participants — 18 teams from 15 high schools or technical colleges that passed the preliminary rounds using RIKEN's supercomputer Fugaku.
Supercomputer Fugaku
Closest pair of points problem
This year's challenge was to find the closest pair of points distributed in a two-dimensional space from a given 500 million points. The participants were required to compute the first, tenth, one hundredth, and one thousandth closest pairs of points and output the respective numbers and distances.
Prof. Rio Yokota explaining this year's challenge
Results and closing ceremony
Results were announced in conjunction with the closing ceremony on August 25, 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, RIKEN Center for Computational Science Director Satoshi Matsuoka, and Professor Makoto Kikuchi from Cybermedia Center, Osaka University, members of co-sponsoring organizations and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology also offered their thoughts.
Tokyo Tech's Provost and EVP Isao Satoh
R-CCS Director Satoshi Matsuoka
Prof. Makoto Kikuchi from CMC
GSIC Professor and SuperCon Committee Chair Shinya Nishizaki announced the top three teams of the competition, and Professor Rio Yokota from Tokyo Tech's School of Computing offered an explanation and comments of the final problems and answers.*
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Affiliations are accurate as of the date of the contest.
SuperCon 2023 winners
1st place: Team KMB76, Nada Senior High School
2nd place: Team honyanya, Kaisei Senior High School
3rd place: Team prism, Senior High School at Komaba, University of Tsukuba
Team KMB76 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.
