ECE Florida Team Wins First-Ever Dell EMC AI Challenge

A UF ECE team has won the first-ever Dell EMC AI Challenge, a competition created to demonstrate the application of AI technologies in technical and business problems.

The UF team, which previously emerged as a finalist after an initial round of the challenge, was selected as the first-place winner after submitting results of their CPU+GPU+FPGA heterogeneous computing research targeting physics applications. The team members, all second-year graduate research assistants at NSF Center for Space, High-Performance, and Resilient Computing (SHREC), developed deep learning algorithms for high-energy physics and benchmarked performance on state-of-the-art hardware that was provided by Dell EMC.

Dell EMC announced the winner at the recently held Supercomputing Conference in Dallas, Texas. As the winner, the UF team has received exclusive access to a high-performance cluster at the Dell EMC AI Innovation Lab, with 200K core-hours of computation available for the team to continue their research and development to improve upon their work with more complex deep learning algorithms.

A variety of outlets have published announcements of the results of the challenge; a few are below: