HPCwire: Louisiana Students Collaborate to Compete in Programming Contest

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October 22, 2009

Louisiana Students Collaborate to Compete in Programming Contest

BATON ROUGE, La., Oct. 22 -- Most college students spend their Friday nights partying, hanging out with friends or getting ready to tailgate for the game on Saturday. But, a group of students from five universities across Louisiana has come up with a new Friday night activity.

Using interactive technology, the students meet every Friday evening and practice as a group to prepare for the Student Programming Contest that will take place as part of Supercomputing 2009, the premier international conference on high-performance computing and its related tools, technologies and applications.

The students, who are all in different cities, communicate with each other in real time using video conferencing streamed across the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, or LONI, a high-speed, fiber optic network that links supercomputing resources at the state's major research institutions. In addition to meeting every Friday via LONI resources, the students use e-mail and instant messaging to communicate with each other during the week on programming problems.

The student team, comprised of Lei Jiang, LSU; Joshua Hitchins, Louisiana Tech University; Jeffrey Morgan, Southern University; Cory Redfern, University of New Orleans; and Nikhil Shetty, University of Louisiana at Lafayette; will compete together in the Student Programming Contest, which will take place Monday, Nov. 16 on the opening day of Supercomputing Conference 2009 in Portland, Oregon. During the contest, they will receive eight to 12 problems from various computational science disciplines to solve on site, so the preparation beforehand is important.

LONI and the students' home universities will fund their travel costs to Portland so they can compete in the contest and participate in other activities during Supercomputing 2009.

"We have had student teams from Louisiana universities compete during Supercomputing in past years, but this is the first time we have used LONI as a resource to recruit students from the different sites to compete together on the same team," said Kathryn Traxler, education, outreach and training specialist at the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, who supervises the students as they practice. "This is part of our work in Louisiana's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, through the Board of Regents, to build collaborative student teams, and it also gives the students and us a chance to use the high-speed networking connectivity we have in state through LONI to enable group research among Louisiana's higher education institutions."

The six students all attend LONI universities, and many of them also work with faculty and researchers on CyberTools, a project among faculty at different LONI sites to build new tools and applications that will allow scientists to use modern cyberinfrastructure more effectively. Traxler worked with faculty through LONI to select a student from each university to participate in the programming contest.

Hitchins, Morgan and Redfern are undergraduate students and Jiang and Shetty are graduate students. All agree this activity gives them a unique way to collaborate with their peers in other parts of the state.

"It was a chance to do something different, and broaden my horizons," Morgan said. Hitchins added, "This gives us an interactive experience to use technology across long distances, so there is an interconnectedness within the group."

Jiang pointed out that students preparing for careers or further study in computational science will need experience working in collaborative research teams, and this training provides such an opportunity. "I need to gain experience working with other researchers, and this presented an opportunity to try something I have not done yet," Redfern said.

"It's also a good chance to show you can program," Jiang added.

The student team will continue meeting each Friday to practice programming exercises until the competition date, when they all will travel to Portland to compete against other student teams. Regardless of whether they win or lose, all agree the training sessions are providing them with a valuable opportunity to practice collaborative research.

"The world seem to be getting more and more virtual, and I think experiences like this enable me with the tools and techniques to work more effectively in such environments," Shetty said.

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Source: LSU Center for Computation & Technology

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