In this blog post, we hear from Ivan Korniichuk, a member of the third-placed team in BEAR Challenge 2024, who gives his perspective on the recent event.
I am delighted to announce that our team “return -1” achieved 3rd place in the BEAR Challenge 2024!
Participating in this intensive three-day event at the University of Birmingham was an incredible experience. I had the opportunity to work with the Baskerville High Performance Computer (HPC) to tackle complex tasks set by experts from Advanced Research Computing (ARC), NVIDIA, and Lenovo, gaining invaluable experience with tools like PyTorch and TensorFlow Keras with GPU acceleration.
All challenges were exciting and provided clear instructions, which was particularly beneficial given that our team comprises Year 1 [undergraduate] students. I enjoyed working with Convolutional Neural Networks to train models for hurricane classification and retina segmentation. We encountered some difficulties on day 1 setting up the Python environment in JupyterLab and faced minor issues running sbatch, but by days 2 and 3, we had overcome these difficulties and performed well.
The friendly atmosphere and camaraderie among all the participants made the challenge even more enjoyable. Throughout the event, we had the privilege of networking with professionals from NVIDIA and Lenovo, who shared insightful perspectives on the future of AI and HPC, enriching our understanding of upcoming trends and technologies.
Looking ahead, we are thrilled to have qualified for the upcoming CIUK competition. Additionally, we are excited about our visit to the BEAR Data Centre, where we expect to gain deeper insights into advanced computing infrastructure.
A special thank you to the ARC team for organising such an outstanding event. Additionally, I would like to extend my immense appreciation to my exceptional teammates Ayush Acharjya, Lydia Barucka, Vivan Waghela, and Fearne Townsend for their dedication and outstanding teamwork. Being a part of this team introduced me to some new faces, but I believe we worked well together. I am grateful for the opportunity to meet and collaborate with such talented people.