Students Invited to Participate in ACM Regional Programming Contest Nov. 6 & 7
Undergraduate students from community and technical colleges and universities in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana are invited to register to participate in the Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, South Central Regional Collegiate Programming Contest, which will take place Nov. 6 and 7, 2009.
The regional contest is part of annual events leading up to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals. In the semester prior to the international contest, students from universities around the world compete regionally in teams of three undergraduate students and one professor, who acts as the coach. The top regional teams worldwide earn an invitation to compete at the World Finals, which will take place in spring 2010.
LSU, through the Center for Computation & Technology and the Department of Computer Science, hosts the ACM South Central Regional Collegiate Programming Contest. This year, that contest will take place Saturday, Nov. 7, with an introductory scripting contest on Friday, Nov. 6.
The professor acting as coach must register each team by Saturday, Oct. 31 to compete in the regional competition. Teams pay a registration fee of $175, or an early bird fee of $125 if they register by Wednesday, Sept. 30. To register, visit: http://icpc.baylor.edu .
This contest is open to any undergraduates who are interested in programming, and students will have opportunities to practice in teams before the actual competition. Sites where students can participate in the 2009 ACM South Central Regional Collegiate Programming Contest are:
• LSU, Baton Rouge, La.
• East Central University, Ada, Okla.
• University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, Tex.
• Texas A & M University, College Station, Tex.
• Abilene Christian University, Abilene, Tex.
• LeTourneau University, Longview, Tex.
During the competition, teams will confront eight or more complex, real-world problems within a five-hour deadline. The teammates collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds and build software systems that solve the problems under the intense scrutiny of expert judges. The team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts in the least time is declared the regional winner and advances to the international contest. The regional contest will award prizes including games, gift certificates and plaques to participating teams.
For more information on the regional competition, visit: http://acm2009.cct.lsu.edu.
CCT Welcomes:
• Alex Nagelberg, who will join Professor Thomas Sterling's Systems Science and Engineering Focus Area as a software engineer on Oct. 1.
Pats on the Back:
• Congratulations to the 13 CCT faculty members who were named among LSU's 2009 Rainmakers in their respective departments: Q. Jim Chen, Sitharama Iyengar, Brygg Ullmer, Gabrielle Allen, Tevfik Kosar, Thomas Sterling, Jagannathan "Ram" Ramanujam, Rudy Hirschheim, Susanne Brenner, Sumanta Acharya, Stephen David Beck, Chris White and Mark Jarrell. LSU's Office of Research and Economic Development selects the LSU Rainmakers each year to honor those faculty who have made outstanding contributions in their field toward research, education and innovation.
• Ram Ramanujam received an award from the National Science Foundation titled "Collaborative Research: An Environment for Portable High Productivity High Performance Computing on GPUs/Accelerators.” This project is in collaboration with the Ohio State University Research Foundation. The award is $263,745 for three years.
• Mark Jarrell's Department of Energy project titled "Predictive Capability for Strongly Correlated Systems: Mott Transition in MnO, Multielectron Magnetic Moments, and Dynamic Effects in Correlated Materials" has been transferred to LSU with a balance of $67,657.
• Thomas Sterling gave an invited presentation on “HPC Phase VI – the Final Convergence” at the DoD Advanced Computing Systems (ACS) Research Program Workshop in Annapolis, Maryland. Sterling was among only five such invited talks at the meeting and was invited to participate on a panel on resource-aware systems.
• Thomas Sterling also attended and participated in the ScalPerf’09 Workshop, in Bertinoro, Italy. This was the 7th in a series of this international conference, which brings together experts from the multidisciplinary domains relevant to the application and operation of parallel computing. Sterling gave a presentation on “HPC in Phase Change” and discussed the need for new execution models to enable future Exaflops scale machines.
• The SAGA team comprising of Hartmut Kaiser, Andre Merzky, Ole Weidner and Shantenu Jha ran a two-day SAGA tutorial and training session at the National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh.
• Ole Weidner and Shantenu Jha ran a half-day SAGA event at the Advanced Distributed Summer School in Oxford, UK.
• Ole Weidner worked with collaborators at CERN leading to a demonstration and a talk (given by Shantenu Jha ) at the EGEE conference in Barcelona, showing the integration of TeraGrid and EGEE resources and their uptake by Lattice QCD application.
Lectures This Week:
• ECE Research Seminar Series presents “The Local View in Networks,” by Ashu Sabharwal, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Director of the Center for Multimedia Communication, Rice University. The lecture will be on Oct. 7, 2009 from 10-11 a.m. in Room 117 Electrical Engineering Building
• Xin Li, Assistant Professor at CCT and Electrical and Computer Engineering, will be organizing this year's CCT Colloquium Series. He is working hard to put together an interesting program for the coming year and would appreciate any input or suggestions. Feel free to contact Xin at xinli@cct.lsu.edu.
Please Note:
• Future ALL CCT meetings for the Fall 2009 semester will take place Oct. 21, Nov. 11 and Dec. 16. All meetings are at 3 p.m. in Johnston 338 unless otherwise announced. Please make every effort to attend these important meetings.
• There will be an Introduction to MPI -- Part 2 training on Thursday, Oct. 1 from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. in 338 Johnston. For more information or to register, please visit: http://www.hpc.lsu.edu/training/tutorials/index.php#fall09mpi2
• CCT Events Coordinator Jennifer Claudet is placing an order for CCT shirts. If you are interested, please stop by her office, Room 140 in the CCT Annex, to look at the catalogs and place your order. Payments must be made in advance!
• CCT faculty, staff and students can access pictures from events, conferences and activities from the online photo gallery at http://www.cct.lsu.edu/site97.php. These images are CCT property and are available to use for posters, presentations and other needs.
• Louisiana Tech University is hosting the first 2009-2010 LONI HPC Workshop. The workshop curriculum will cover basics needed to get started with HPC and parallel programming. There are only 25 seats available, and participants cannot attend remotely. For more information, the topics to be presented or to register, please visit: http://www.hpc.lsu.edu/training/20091006/index.php.
• Registration is now open for the Supercomputing 2009 Education Program at the conference in Portland, which will take place Nov. 14-17. The Education Program helps educators and students learn more about computational science topics and gives educators ideas to bring these topics into their classrooms. The program is open to undergraduate faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and high school teachers. To register or for more information, please visit http://computationalscience.org/sc09 .
• The SC09 Student Contest Program is accepting team registrations. This is a competitive programming event, where teams of no more than five students will be given eight to 12 problems from various scientific problem domain areas. The competition will take place Monday, Nov. 16 at the SC09 conference in Portland, Oregon. Awards will be announced on Tuesday, November 18 at an SC09 Education Program plenary session. Register your team today, http://sc09.sc-education.org/conference/studentcomp_signup.php . Deadline to register is Thursday, October 1, 2009.
• Please remember to send your news concerning grants, awards, conferences, or other pertinent information that should be communicated to CCT to PR Manager Kristen Sunde at ksunde@cct.lsu.edu.
Upcoming Grant Deadlines:
Note: Please see the CCT deadline Web site, as many NSF deadlines are listed here:
http://www.cct.lsu.edu/about/grants/deadlines/events.php
Publish Date:
09-29-2009
