TeraGrid ’07 Conference
TeraGrid Advancing Scientific Discovery Student Team Competition
Call for Student Competition Entries

June 4-7, 2007
University of Wisconsin
Madison, Wisconsin

The Advancing Scientific Discovery Competition is open to teams of high school, undergraduate and graduate students. The competition encourages teams of students to participate in a computational science competition.

Teams will be given eight to twelve problems from various scientific problem domain areas to solve within 24 hours.  The competition will take place at the TeraGrid’07 conference in Madison, Wisconsin.

Competition Description

• Teams will be given eight to twelve problems from various scientific problem domain areas.
• The competition will take place at the TeraGrid ‘07 conference in Madison, Wisconsin. At least one team member must be physically present, since all program development, testing, and deployment must be done using the on-site-only computational resources.
• General problem descriptions will be released on Friday June 1, 2007 at 6pm PST. The actual problem definitions and datasets will be released via the on-site resources on Monday June 4, 2007 at 6pm. Students will have 24 hours to submit code and solutions to as many problems as they choose.
• Each team will keep a science journal using the provided lab notebooks. The documented process is part of the competition and must be submitted by 6pm June 5, 2007.
• Violations of competition rules may result in disqualification of a team, and possibly all teams from the same school.

Team Composition
A team consists of up to five students from recognized high school, undergraduate, and/or graduate degree programs. There can be no more than three teams per institution. A faculty member may coach no more than one team. Faculty, and other coaches not part of the student team, are encouraged to mentor students up to, and including, release of the problem descriptions; but should have no involvement with students on any aspect of the actual competition, once the problem details are released.

Hardware/Software Environment for the Competition
Every team will be provided access to identical computational resources and science gateways and portals on site. Teams may not share resources, nor can code development/testing be done using any computational resources other than those provided.

Hardware
Hardware for the student competition will consist of access to the Science Gateways. We may use laptops for this purpose.

Team Resources
Team resources will consist solely of a Science Journal describing the findings of the Science Gateway explorations relating to the problems. The only team submissions will be the Science Journal notebook.

Grading Criteria
There is no objective rubric used to tally points in order to rank teams. The application of Computational Science involves the art and practice of computing in science, which is subjective in nature. All judges will rank each team.

The following factors will be taken into consideration in ranking and awarding teams:

• Progress towards a solution
• A complete solution
• Extenuating circumstances of a complete solution, i.e. insightful elegant solutions.
• Robustness of the solution:
• Is the solution general, so that it will work with other data sets?
• Will perterbations in the data destabilize the code?
• Accuracy of the solution
• Quality of the write-up describing the solution
• Science journal
• How sound is the documented engineering process?

Application forms are available at
http://teragrid.org/tg07/submissions/students/author/submit.php
Application Deadline: May 4, 2007

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure

Questions? Please contact us!
TeraGrid 2007 • Wisconsin Union Conference Services
800 Langdon Street • Madison, WI 53706 • Phone: (608) 265-8012 • Fax: (608) 265-8299
Email: teragrid@union.wisc.edu

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