An integral part of XSEDE12, the inaugural conference of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment held in July, was the inclusion of a day-long Student Programming Contest, and a group of XSEDE Scholars from several universities earned the top honors.

The programming competition engages students and creates an excitement for high-performance computing. Participants attending the Chicago conference included high school, undergraduate and graduate students, who formed 11 teams representing Clark Atlanta University, the University of Michigan, the University of Notre Dame Summer Scholars Program, and the XSEDE Scholars program. Each team received identical computational resources -- a LittleFe unit running the Bootable Cluster CD software stack -- and a set of 10 problems from various scientific problem domain areas, and they had seven hours to complete solutions to the problem set and submit them to contest organizers. The winners were announced during the awards luncheon held on the final day of the conference.

"This year's XSEDE Scholars were a particularly talented and impressive group of students," said Richard Tapia, director of the XSEDE Scholars program and keynote speaker for the conference.

"I left the XSEDE12 conference energized by these young leaders," he said, "and am very proud that the winning team of the student programming contest was made up of our Scholars."

Tapia also is a mathematician, the Maxfield-Oshman Professor in Engineering, and director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education at Rice University and director of the Empowering Leadership Alliance.

The winning team of undergraduate and graduate students included Nancy Carlos, Melissa Estrada, David Manosalvas, Justin Peyton, Grace Silva and Manuel Zubieta. The team was coached by Alice Fisher, XSEDE Scholars manager, also of Rice University. A team from the University of Michigan garnered the Second Place award.

Three members of the winning team talked about their participation in the contest:

"Collaborative work was really important since it allowed us to tackle problems quicker and with a higher level of accuracy, as well as academic diversity, which enabled us to have more than one approach to each problem. ... It was a great learning experience, and I am glad I got to be part of it."
--David Manosalvas

"Since the competition lasted for seven hours, our team made a conscious effort to enjoy the time we had working with each other."
--Manuel Zubieta

"Though my programming experience was minimal, I found it both interesting and challenging to attempt complicated problems."
--Nancy Carlos