ACADEMIA

Filip Blagojevic, a PhD student at the College of William and Mary, has been awarded first prize in the 2006 Virginia Tech High-End Computing Challenge (VTHECC). Blagojevic's paper, "Exploring Programming Models and Optimizations for the Cell Broadband Engine using RAxML," evaluates the MPI and OpenMP programming models and processor-specific optimizations in the context of a complex scientific application on the new Cell Broadband Engine. The distinguished awards panel selected a second paper for honorable mention, "MPI-Mitten: Enabling Migration Technology in MPI," with lead author Cong Du of the Illinois Institute of Technology. The authors of the two selected papers will each receive a cash award in recognition of their achievement. Challenge director Kirk Cameron was pleased with the quality of the papers that were submitted during this first year of the competition. Patterned after the well-known Gordon Bell prizes presented annually at the SC conference, the goal of the VTHECC is to encourage participation by graduate and undergraduate students in high-performance computing. The challenge is sponsored by Virginia Tech, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. A call for submissions for the 2007 VTHECC will be available soon at its Web site.