SC10 Education Program Student Programming Contest

Online registration for the SC10 Student Contest is available here. Please send any questions to contest@sc-education.org.

Problems sets are available online from the SC08 and SC07 and SC09 conference contests.

Description

The SC10 Education Program Student Programming Contest is a competitive programming event held at the SC10 conference in New Orleans, Louisiana where the student contestants will test their ability to solve a series of Computational Science problems. Each problem has the potential to come from any of the major scientific disciplines and is almost guaranteed to require some level of programming. This contest provides an excellent experience for students hoping to enter the fields of High Performance and Scientific Computing while being in the midst of the largest annual conference for the field.

Team Composition

Each team should follow these guidelines while forming:

  • No more than five members
  • At least one member must be physically present at SC10 in New Orleans
  • Each member must be a student at a recognized high school, college, or university
  • Each team is recommended to have a coach; either a faculty member or another student
  • The team's coach(es) will not be permitted to be involved with the students in any way once the full problems have been released on the day of the contest.

Dates & Times

The contest will be held on Monday, November 15th on-site at the Supercomputing 2010 conference in New Orleans. The bulk of the work will be during the day from 8:30 AM until 5:00 PM in the Education Program's booth. Brief problem descriptions may be released prior to 8:30 AM on the 15th to allow the students to do some background research.

Hardware & Software

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

Hardware

Teams will be given access to a remote cluster which may only be accessed from the SC10 network during the contest. 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. Additional resources may be provided on-site before the event including detailed instructions on how to access and use each one. In past contests participants have had troubles accessing resources. It is recommended that once connection information is available, you familiarize yourself with the process.

Software

Each member of the team will have an account on the resource(s). The specific software packages available will vary by resource, but the contestants should expect each to have compilers (e.g., icc or gcc), debugging tools (e.g., gdb), parallel programming environments (e.g., MPI or OpenMP), and in some cases certain scientific packages. For most resources we will not be able to control the software installed, but teams may request additional software from the contest coordinators in the time preceding the contest. In no case will the contest problems require root access ("sudo" or "elevated privileges") on the resource, though teams may be asked to install software in their personal working directories on the resource.

Evaluation

Each team will be evaluated based on the following general factors. The individual problems may have more specific stipulations based on these:

  • Presentation
    • For each problem attempted, the team is expected to submit a concise and professional write-up dictating the approach taken towards a solution, descriptions of any included code, an outline for how to compile and run included code, how future work on the problem might look, and any other information the team deems meaningful. This category also takes into consideration readability of code, including the effective use of comments.
  • Implementation
    • As stated above, most problems will require some programming. Any code submitted is expected to complete, working code. Teams will be scored negatively if code does not compile, run, or is excessively difficult to read.
  • Performance
    • Code performance is an important issue in the High Performance Computing industry and will also be important for teams' problem solutions. Code that is not able to finish within the alloted time for the contest, or takes an excessive amount of time to complete will be reflected in the team's score for this category.

Additional Resources

Students interested in participating in this contest may find the following resources useful:

Questions, Comments, Concerns

Any questions concerning the 2010 SCEd Student Programming Contest should be sent to the contest coordinator, contest@sc-education.org.