RENO, Nev., July 17 -- The stakes will be high for scientists, computing and network leaders at the SC07 conference, held in Reno, Nevada from November 10-16, 2007. This year, the conference will feature four exciting challenges that will test the most creative and innovative approaches to the application and analysis of high performance network resources. The SC07 Challenges will include the Analytics Challenge, the Bandwidth Challenge, the Storage Challenge and the Cluster Challenge, which will debut this year.

"Each year, the SC conference provides a friendly competitive platform for teams of scientists, researchers and networking experts from around the world to showcase their abilities to push supercomputing and networking resources to the edge," said Harvey Wasserman, SC07 Technical Program Chair from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "This year, we are pleased to offer four challenges that will highlight not only technical prowess but the great collaboration among the teams involved."

Teams who enter the challenges will be judged by a panel of experts from each challenge area. Winners will present their results at special conference sessions and will be honored in an awards ceremony. Details and deadlines for the challenge submissions include:

Cluster Challenge

The Cluster Challenge, which will debut this year at SC07, will showcase how easily the enormous power of today's clusters -- computing power that in the past was only available to national labs --- can be put to work. In this challenge, teams of undergraduate students will assemble a small cluster on the Exhibit floor and run benchmarks & applications selected by industry and high performance computing (HPC) veterans. The challenge will be judged on the speed of benchmarks and the throughput of application runs over the first three days of the conference. Completed submissions for the Cluster Challenge are due by July 31, 2007.

Bandwidth Challenge

For the eighth consecutive year, the Bandwidth Challenge will serve as a competition for leading-edge network applications developed by teams of researchers from around the world and as a showcase for the technologies and people who provide the networking capabilities crucial to supercomputing. The Bandwidth Challenge, which will utilize SCinet, the ultra-high performance network built each year on the conference exhibit floor, is designed to test the limits of network capabilities, and past events have showcased multi-gigabit-per-second demonstrations never before thought possible. This year the theme of the Bandwidth Challenge is "End-to-End Achievement -- Serving as a Model" which tests a team's ability to fully utilize high bandwidth links from each end point. Submissions to participate in the Bandwidth Challenge are due July 31, 2007.

Analytics Challenge

More than ever before, organizations in commercial, government, university, and research sectors are increasingly tasked with making sense of huge amounts of underutilized data. These dynamics have led to the growing area of SC07 Analytics. The Analytics Challenge will highlight sophisticated methods of data analysis and visualization used in high performance computing by showcasing powerful analytics applications solving complex, real-world problems. Completed submissions for the Analytics Challenge are due July 31, 2007.

Storage Challenge

High performance computing (HPC) systems are comprised of 3 major subsystems: processing, networking and storage. In different applications, any one of these subsystems can limit the overall system performance. The HPC Storage Challenge is a competition showcasing effective approaches using the storage subsystem, which is often the limiting system, with actual applications. Participants with access to either large or small HPC systems are encouraged to enter this challenge. Submissions to participate are due by July 31, 2007.

For full details on each challenge and specific requirements, visit http://sc07.supercomputing.org/?pg=challenges.html.

About SC07

SC07, sponsored by ACM and IEEE Computer Society, will showcase how high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in research, education and commerce. This premiere international conference includes technical and education programs, workshops, tutorials, an exhibit area, demonstrations and hands-on learning. For more information, please visit http://sc07.supercomputing.org/.

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Source: SC07