There are multiple opportunities for students to participate in HPC challenges and competitions.
The SC09 Challenges -- The SC09 conference Challenges will provide a way to showcase both expertise and HPC resources in friendly yet spirited competitions with other participants. SC09 will feature Challenge areas that have been held previously, but may also include new areas of interest. SC08 Challenges, for example, included the Bandwidth Challenge, the Cluster Challenge, and the HPC Storage Challenge. SC09 Challenges will be highlighted to complement the conference theme and technical program agenda. We encourage early submissions as SC09 Challenges will be based on having a minimum number of entries.
Questions: challenges@info.supercomputing.org
SC Education Program Student Contests -- The SC09 Student Contest Program is a competitive programming event. Teams consisting of up to five students will be given eight to twelve problems from various scientific problem domain areas. The contest will take place at the SC09 conference in Portland, Oregon. To accommodate travel impediments, at least one team member is required to be physically present at SC09 in Portland, since all program development, testing, and deployment are restricted to the on-site computational resources. Program descriptions will be released one week prior to the on-site contest. Full problem descriptions and data sets will only be accessible to the teams the day of the actual event. Students will have the bulk of the day, from 8:30 am until 5:00 pm, to submit code and solutions to as many problems as they choose. Part of the judging criteria will involve documentation of the team's activities. Each team will keep an engineering journal using provided paper or electronic lab notebooks. Violations of contest rules may result in the disqualification of a team and possibly all teams from the same school.
http://sc09.sc-education.org/conference/studentcompetition.php
TeraGrid '09 Conference Student Program -- The 2009 TeraGrid conference to be held June 22-25 in Arlington, Virginia, will showcase the capabilities, achievements, and impact of this national network of high-performance computing resources. Students from high school through graduate programs are invited to participate as attendees, volunteers, authors by submitting papers and posters, and competitors by competing in a programming contest. Funding support may be available for selected students, depending on need and the content of a separate financial support application.
Students who are interested in attending the conference can register at http://www.teragrid.org/tg09/. The reduced rate for undergraduate and high school students is $100.
Open Education Cup Competition for High Performance Computing -- Introduced at the SC08 convention, the Open Education Cup is awarding $500 cash prizes for the best Connexions modules in the area of High Performance Computing (HPC). Awards will be granted in each of the following categories:
The Open Education Cup was created to promote awareness of and generate interest in creating Open Educational Resources (OER) in the area of HPC in the hopes that this effort will help the HPC community recognize and embrace the opportunities that OER represent for accelerating workforce development. Effective use of OER can enable educators, instructors and learners to access a rich set of free online teaching and learning materials, eliminating many barriers to providing affordable high-quality HPC education and training programs.
To learn more about the Open Education Cup competition, visit the contest website at http://openeducationcup.org/.