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The Education Center on Computational Science and Engineering, a partner of the Education, Outreach, and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (EOT-PACI), at San Diego State University, recently announced the winners of the Computational Science Olympics (CSO) undergraduate student competition. The First Place award went to Richard Harris and George Rummel for their exceptional work on virtual physics simulations. |
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Second Place was awarded to Tom Williams, Eric Capone, Habib Juarez, and Robert Ward for their work on the Nonlinear Pendulum. Two groups each won Honorable Mention for their computational analysis work on the differential equation dy/dt = [|t - y|]. Harris and Rummel were students together this past year in Professor Tom Impelluso's Engineering 296 course, where they gained valuable experience with parallel computation strategies, and they were ultimately able to get their code to run on the Cray T3E at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Results from each of the winning entries may be viewed below. |
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The CSO Award Recipients |
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First Place: Spinner the Ride - Richard Harris and George Rummel, Developers |
 Richard Harris and George Rummel accept the CSO First Place award from Kris Stewart (far left), as sponsoring Prof. Tom Impelluso (far right) looks on. |
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Second Place: The
Nonlinear Pendulum |
 Tom Williams (right) accepts the CSO award for his team, presented by EdCenter Director Kris Stewart (left), as sponsoring Prof. Peter Salamon (center) looks on. |
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Honorable Mention: One Honorable Mention award each to two groups offering different treatments of the analysis of dy/dt = [|t - y|] Group 1: PK Hau, JD Jacobson, Reine Raheb, Developers (Project url: http://www.geocities.com/reineraheb/project.html or view our local copy) |
 PK Hau and Reine Raheb accept the CSO award for their team, presented by EdCenter Director Kris Stewart, as sponsoring Prof. Peter Salamon looks on. |
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Group 2: Sima Emamifar, Greg Gazelle, Elizabeth Gnecco, and Tolga Kayalar, Developers (Project site url: http://www.geocities.com/lizgnecco/ or view our local copy) |
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About the Computational Science Olympics
The EdCenter is pleased to announce a new RESEARCH PROJECT COMPETITION for CSU undergraduate students. The focus of the competition is computational science, in particular the use of advanced computing resources and Web applications for research in disciplines such as biology, chemistry, physics, geology, engineering, geography, social sciences and humanities.
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Good
science is not done only by PhD's! Be a researcher now!
Undergrads - get to know computational science approaches and prepare yourself better for the research and work environments of the new century! |
WHAT IS COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE?
We view Computational Science as the intersection of three main academic disciplines:
Bioinformatics, computational physics and chemistry, geographic information science are examples of new exciting research fields that have gained strength in recent years. The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) supports demanding visualization, simulation, modeling, on-line analysis of large datasets, digital libraries, etc. We encourage you to develop your class projects or independent research projects so that they require a blend of your discipline-specific research and good computing, and submit them to the Computational Science Olympics for a review and (possibly) an award.
For example, the modeling and visualization of the body mechanics of the human knee or the motion of a roller coaster. But we would like to hear from you based on your own interests involving science and computing.
- Revisit your recent projects that involved computers (beyond using a word processor to type up a term paper, obviously, or a web page of links to the work of other people). We are interested in your work, we want to reward your efforts to be creative.
- Try to think about how creative use of computers helped you approach the solution more quickly and made the results more presentable. Whether you discovered a new phenomenon, or found a new way to demonstrate the known - we are interested in your approaches and results. CREATIVE THINKING IS WHAT COUNTS THE MOST!
- Assemble a team of partners, though this is not necessary. For example, a biology senior develops a molecular science project in a class that could benefit from interactive data entry and visualization. This student might attend one of the computer club meetings of the ACM [Association for Computing Machinery] and talk with other students to see if they have ideas about how to extend and generalize the original molecular project.
- Explore how others have used computational science tools in attacking various scientific problems. A good place to start would be the Ed Center's NPACI Showroom (www.edcenter.sdsu.edu/npaci/), a collection, by discipline, of a small subset of computing activities from the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) (www.npaci.edu)
- Contact us at the Ed Center to discuss your project ideas.
- Take a look at the 2000 CSO Winning simulation and paper by Lena van der Stap and Patrick McNairnie "Simulation of the Contractile Behavior of an Isolated Cardiac Myocyte" from the Ed Center page (www.edcenter.sdsu.edu/cso/cso1999.html).
- Handling large data sets
- Digital Libraries
- Web-based information integration
- 3-D Visualization, specifically web-based
- Advanced Numerical Simulation
- Knowledge Discovery
and Data Mining
Of course, you are not limited to these applications and approaches. Please contact us early if you have an intriguing application in mind that involves the use of modern high-performance computing techniques. Look at National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), The National Computational Science Alliance, (NCSA), and the Education Center on Computational Science & Engineering (EdCenter), to get the flavor of computational science approaches, methods, and applications we are interested in.
Any student enrolled in a degree-granting undergraduate course of study at any of California State Universities during 2000-2001 academic year is eligible. Team projects can be submitted (and are encouraged). At least 2/3 of the team should be undergraduate students, and the main author should be an undergraduate. Class projects are also encouraged.
We are looking for projects that demonstrate how creative, intelligent computing helps solve scientific and engineering problems, in various fields. On the formal side, your project submission should include:
- A text description of the project (at least 8 pages, not including graphics) as an e-mail attachment sent to edcenter@sdsu.edu
- A brief web page describing the project.
- Software demonstration, in some appropriate form (linked to your Web page, if the software runs on the Web; a video of simulation experiments; visualization snapshots, or similar); please contact us (619) 594 0491 or edcenter@sdsu.edu for details.
- An application form
The next CSO competition begins in Fall 2001. Fall and Spring semester 2001-2002 projects are eligible.
Next Submission Deadline March 30, 2002