DESERT ACADEMY STUDENTS PARTICIPATE IN SUPERCOMPUTING CHALLENGE
Several Desert students participated in the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge this school year. The Challenge is an educational outreach program coordinated primarily by LANL, designed to give students access to the expertise and resources available in New Mexico and help them complete a computation-based project that interests them. Our three teams and their project titles were:
Sean Colin-Ellerin and Isaac Green
Title: Socialist Manifesto
Summary: made an agent-based economic model to look at the effect of the tax rate on overall equality and wealth distribution
Megan Belzner, Matt Rohr and Bjorn Swenson
Title: Arbitrary Precision Integers on the Cell Processor
Summary: created a library for the PS3′s processor which can handle really large numbers, so that the Playstation (or publicly accessible LANL computers) can be used for the purposes of making and breaking encryption
Sara Hartse and Katie Boot
Title: The Spread of the Black Death in London
Summary: made an agent-based epidemic model overlaying an historical map of London and then found disease spread and infectiousness parameters that provide historically accurate results
The latter two teams were selected as finalists in the competition (i.e. their projects were judged to be in the top fifth of all submitted). Megan, Matt and Bjorn won the Cray award for high performance computing, and Sara and Katie’s team won two Santa Fe Institute awards, one for best epidemiology model (epidemiology was this year’s theme) and one for best agent-based model. There were about 85 teams from Artesia to Farmington, and out of about 12 special awards we took 3!!
Congratulations to all of our participants!
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