SC students Brian Bartoldson, Eitan Lees, Juan Llanos, Ian McCann, Dan Smith, and Amirhessam Tahmassebi will compete with representatives from other universities across the southeast at the upcoming XSEDE conference in Miami, July 17-21, 2016. Alex Townsend will take part in the first local competition and is an alternate for competing in Miami.

The competition has three stages, and the students will compete twice locally. On Friday, April 1st the students will be given a test problem to be analyzed and solved over the weekend with the solution due on Monday, April 4th. Two weeks later, on Friday April 15th, the group will be given a real problem which will again be due the following Monday. John Burkardt is working with the students to prepare them for the competition in Miami.

“On April 1st I’ll give the students the problem from last year’s conference as a practice problem for them to turn in on Monday. Then on Friday April 15th the students will receive an actual problem. In both cases, the team will work over the weekend on coming up with an approach to the problem, getting background information, writing programs and creating illustrations, and making a report, which will be reviewed by a panel of judges. They’ll have six hours to complete the problem,” Burkardt said.

After completing these tasks, the local team will qualify to attend the conference and will receive travel and hotel support. At the conference, the group will compete against teams from other Florida universities.

Paul van der Mark, the local XSEDE organizer for FSU, and Mark Jack, associate professor of physics at FAMU joined resources and are collaborating for the Tallahassee area universities. When the students submit their solutions, local judges Mike Schneier, Luca Bertagna and Lindley Graham will review their work.

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world. It is a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data, and expertise.

The fifth annual conference of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) will be held July 17-21, 2016, at the InterContinental Miami Hotel in Miami, FL. The theme for XSEDE16 is "Diversity, Big Data, and Science at Scale: Enabling the Next Generation of Science and Technology."