HPCwire: TopCoder, NVIDIA Announce Winners of CUDA Superhero Challenge

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October 01, 2009

TopCoder, NVIDIA Announce Winners of CUDA Superhero Challenge

Developers from Switzerland, China, Russian Federation, South Africa and Japan reap rewards with the NVIDIA CUDA architecture

GLASTONBURY, Conn., Oct. 1 -- NVIDIA Corporation and TopCoder, Inc. today announced the winners of the first CUDA Superhero Challenge at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference. The Challenge series of contests asks computer programmers to harness the parallel processing power of the NVIDIA CUDA architecture to solve some of computing's biggest challenges. First place prize went to Micha Riser, of Zurich, Switzerland, who earned a $2,500 prize for his winning solution, closely followed by runner up Hou Qiming of Beijing, China, who won $1,000 for his submission.

"I started exploring CUDA only in the second week of the contest. I had heard of it before but never got the chance to try it out myself," said Riser, a software engineer at carrara engineering GmbH, Switzerland. "The contest was very fun, and I learned much about the CUDA framework and the computation power of the NVIDIA graphic cards as well as about the CCL problem and different ways to solve it."

This first Challenge in the series of contests ran Sept. 14 through Sept. 25, and centered on image processing using GPU accelerated connected component labeling (CCL). One of the most common processing steps in applications such as real time object recognition, machine vision and many others, CCL is a simple but computationally intensive process. A series of high resolution images were provided and competitors were challenged to identify all objects and areas consisting of groups of adjacent pixels of the same color within a specified threshold, with submitted implementations scored on the basis of correctness and total overall performance.

"We were able to enlighten 1,000s of developers on the advantages parallel programming offers," said Sanford Russell, general manager of the CUDA group at NVIDIA. "When talented developers see the ease and performance advantages of co-processing with the NVIDIA CUDA architecture first-hand, they understand the excitement behind the GPU Computing revolution."

The full problem set can be found at http://www.topcoder.com/longcontest/?module=ViewProblemStatement&compid=97 32&rd=13957.

Final Results

1st Place Micha Riser, Zurich, Switzerland "iquadrat" $2,500

2nd Place Hou Qiming, Tangshan Province, China "b285714" $1,000

3rd Place Sergey Ilin, Omsk, Russian Federation "nemossi" $750

4th Place Jaco Cronje, Rietvalleirand, South Africa "JacoCronje" $500

5th Place Noriyuki Futatsugi, Tokyo, Japan "foota" $250

The five winners from across the globe share a total $5,000 in prizes and were announced live today at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif.

The second competition in the series will run Nov. 23 through Dec. 7. Additional details about the Challenge can be found at www.topcoder.com/nvidia.

To learn more about the NVIDIA CUDA architecture or to accelerate programming skills for this challenge, developers are invited to attend NVIDIA Webinar tutorials and use the extensive self study materials available at www.nvidia.com/cuda.

About TopCoder

TopCoder is the world's largest competitive software development community with more than 220,000 developers representing over 200 countries. TopCoder hosts the largest and most comprehensive developer ratings and performance metrics available. The TopCoder community builds software for a wide-ranging client base through a competitive, rigorous, standards based methodology. This methodology results in a highly consistent set of software components allowing a software-as-parts approach to application development. TopCoder makes this large library of software components built through competition available to all of our clients. Utilizing a world-wide member base and this library, TopCoder seeks to lower the cost of software development while increasing both the speed at which applications can be developed and the quality of the ultimate application. For more information about sponsoring TopCoder events and utilizing TopCoder's software services, visit http://www.topcoder.com/.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) awakened the world to the power of computer graphics when it invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from portable media players to notebooks to workstations. NVIDIA's expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. Fortune magazine has ranked NVIDIA #1 in innovation in the semiconductor industry for two years in a row. For more information, see www.nvidia.com.

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Source: TopCoder, Inc.

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