Global Grid Exchange®
Higher-Ed Student Project Competition Announced
Fall 2007


The West Virginia High Tech Consortium Foundation’s Global Grid Exchange® program is proud to announce the Fall 2007 Higher-Ed Student Project Competition. This is a statewide competition that encourages undergraduate and graduate level college students to embrace one of the newest trends in the computing industry, grid computing. This year, the West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation is the sponsor.

The Global Grid Exchange program aggregates the computational capacity of thousands of Internet-connected computers to deliver advanced supercomputing capacity on demand. Computational grids are being used by researchers and businesses to solve computationally intense problems in domains such as Life Science, Energy, Semiconductors, Defense and Finance, to name but a few. Past competition entries have covered a broad range of fields - from decryption to wireless communications. By harnessing the power of thousands of computers to work in parallel, grids allow problems to be solved in days that would otherwise take decades.

Students (or student teams) who wish to participate in this competition are challenged to write grid-based computer applications that leverage the power of the Global Grid Exchange program. Winning applications will either perform a well-defined “deep” calculation or provide a “user capability;” in either case, relying on computations that are not possible (in reasonable time) without the power afforded by a computational grid.

In the spirit of grid computing, in which computational work is performed remotely, all aspects of the competition will be conducted online. Applicants will submit their grid application along with instructions for its execution plus any datasets required for a verification test. Source code for the application must also be submitted; the code will be judged for its engineering quality and informative documentation.

Whereas a traditional science fair would require a presentation poster to accompany a project submission, this competition requires students to adopt the modern business practice of making presentations via telephone conference calling accompanied by electronic media (e.g., a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation or interactive web site). The presentation must describe the application, why it requires grid-scale computation, difficulties encountered during its development, known limitations and suggested future enhancements or research direction.

One first place prize of $1,000 and one second place prize of $500 will be given in this competition.

Any undergraduate or graduate student attending a West Virginia higher-education institution interested in math, engineering, and/or computer science can participate. Those students who have Java programming experience will be at a slight advantage over those who do not.

Students interested in competing should submit an entry form and declare their official entrance in the competition no later than Monday, October 1, 2007. More information and entry forms can be obtained by emailing a request to bbunner@wvhtf.org. Completed entry forms can be emailed, faxed or mailed to Brent Bunner, WVHTC Foundation, 1000 Technology Drive, Suite 1000, Fairmont, WV 26554. Phone: (304) 333-6766. Fax: (304) 366-2699. Email: bbunner@wvhtf.org