Supercomputing Student Competition Program

Online registration for the SC08 Student Competition Program is available here. Please send any questions to studentcomp@sc-education.org.

Last year's student competitions problems are available online here.

Description

The SC08 Student Competition 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 competition will take place at the SC08 conference in Austin, Texas. To accommodate travel impediments, at least one team member is required to be physically present at SC08 in Austin, 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 competition. 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 competition rules may result in the disqualification of a team and possibly all teams from the same school.

Team Composition

A team consists of up to five students from recognized high school, undergraduate, and/or graduate degree programs. There can be no more than three teams per institution. A faculty member may coach no more than one team. Faculty, and other coaches not part of the student team, are encourage to mentor students up to, and including, release of the problem descriptions; bus should have no involvement with the students on any aspect of the actual competition once the full problem details are released on the day of the event.

Hardware/Software Environments

Every team will be provided access to identical computational resources on site. Teams may not share resources, nor can code development/testing be done using any computational resources other than those provided.

Hardware

During the competition, teams will be given access to a remote cluster which may only be accessed from the SC07 network during the competition. It is anticipated that teams will have a one-week window of access to the computational resources prior to the release of the problem descriptions.

Software

Every team will be given an account on a cluster. Compilers, debugging tools and parallel environments will be available on the resource, as well as some scientific software packages. Teams may request the installation of software during the one-week access window prior to the release of the problem descriptions. During the event, teams may install their own software provided such installation does not require root privileges.

Evaluation Criteria

The following factors will be taken into consideration in ranking and awarding team honors:

  • Process toward a solution
  • A complete solution
  • Extenuating circumstances of a complete solution, i.e. insightful elegant solutions
  • Robustness of the solution.
    • Is the code general, so that it will work with other data sets?
    • Will perturbations in the data destabilize the code?
  • Accuracy of the solution
  • Quality of the write-up describing the teams activities to solving the problem
  • Engineering journal
    • How sound is the documented engineering process?
    • Is the documented process consistent with the runs made through the development and scoring queues?

Resources for Preparation and Team Support

Computational Resources

Looking into these resources ahead of time will help prepare students for the challenges they will face during the competition.

Funding

  • Your college department or high school administration may provide partial funding for the event.
  • Check with your campus' grants coordinator, who may be able to identify supplemental funds or funds available specifically for students to attend such events.
  • National Science Foundation (NSF) based grants

More Information

For more information, please direct questions to studentcomp@sc-education.org