NEW:    RESULTS OF SOFTWARE COMPETITION

Dates

The software competition will be held at Clemson University during the weekend of March 30th to April 1st.  Competition will begin on Friday whenever teams arrive and will continue until judging on Sunday morning.  Specifics are to be decided at a later date. Competitors can expect that competition will begin midday Friday, continue until late that night, begin early Saturday morning, continue until late that night, and then have judging done that morning. It is not required that teams be present for all the time the competition is open.

The competition will be held in room 321 on the 3rd floor of Riggs Hall on the campus of Clemson University. Riggs Hall is just a short drive / walk from the Madren Center. Check out this map for a marked map of campus. The red line shows the path from the Madren Center (number 75, P3, center top, marked with a purple circle) to Riggs Hall (number 104, S11, center, marked with a blue circle).

Teams can be no larger than 4 members.  All members must be undergraduate students.  One team member is designated the team captain.  To register, send email to Nathan DeBardeleben (ndebard@parl.clemson.edu) with the following information:

• Name and location of the team's college or university
• Number of team members - including captain
• Name, email address, and daytime telephone number of the team captain

We reserve the right to decline teams to register due to of lack of facilities.  However, we do not expect this to be the case.  It is important that you register beforehand so that your team is assured a slot.  Late registration will be accepted but these cases are what forces us to decline applicants.
Each team (or at least the captain) must check-in at the conference venue to confirm his or her team's participation in the software competition.  Teams that have not checked-in by Saturday morning at 10:00am will lose their slot if there are teams waiting to compete.  Note that final check-in is 10:00am Saturday but competition starts whenever teams arrive on Friday.

The specifics of scoring will be decided much later but you can be assured that there will be many distinct levels of the project.  The more levels you complete the higher your score will be.  We will also score based on time to complete these levels.  We may score based on performance of your code (parallel execution time), your software engineering design, and possibly on presentation (graphically).

• Computer with some recent version of RedHat Linux - including X11 for windowing
• MPICH MPI Implementation (Message Passing Interface) - parallel computing
• gcc - C, C++ compiler
• java - if you like, good for graphics
• X11 library - if you like programming graphics in X
• Documentation, sample code, hints, suggestions

• Microsoft Windows - we will not have MS Windows of any form, competitors must know how to use Linux and program under it.  Why?  We're interested in high performance, parallel computing, and good software engineering./font>
• Books - you can bring any paper products with you, we just will not provide them

• Internet access  - This is a competition!  You will not be allowed to access the internet in any way i.e. www, ftp, telnet, ssh, rlogin, etc, etc.
• Disks - Again, this is a competition!  You will not be allowed to bring any data medium to the competition.  This includes, but is not limited to: floppy disks, CDs, ZIP disks.

As is customary, we will not disclose what the project is until teams arrive - this is termed the Short Term Competition.
Clemson's Computer Engineering program has three main focuses and thus, this competition will touch on all of them:

• High Performance Parallel Computing
• Software Engineering
• Artificial Intelligence

The project will involve some aspect of AI and will be broken into parts that should be designed using good software engineering principles.  As described in the scoring section, there will be different levels of difficulty.  You can expect that the higher difficulty levels will involve parallel programming and higher scores will be awarded to those whose projects are fastest.

In particular, the software you use and develop may include AI topics ranging from Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Image Recognition, Digital Image Processing, and Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNNs).  You may also encounter certain aspects of the software that pertain to queueing theory and in particular: Continuous Time Markov Chains (CTMCs) and M/M/1 queues.

How do you prepare?  In-depth knowledge of AI, parallel programming, and stochastic processes are not required.  We will provide documentation, APIs, sample code, hints, suggestions, and in some cases even complete sections of difficult code.  The parallel programming will be done using message passing - not shared memory.  We may provide access to one of our Beowulf clusters for testing but it is not necessary.  The API you will use is MPI (MPICH) - Message Passing Interface.  MPI is quickly becoming / has already become the standard.  You may want to become familiar with MPI before arriving.  Their web page has tutorials and the API posted.

While we do not anticipate the NEED for graphical programming, you should prepare for it as presentation is a part of the scoring.  We recognize that time will be of the essence and of course will take this into account.  Java provides an easy way to do graphics programing quickly and you may want to use this for certain aspects of your project.

Vipin Kumar et. al., Introduction to Parallel Computing - Design and Analysis of Algorithms, 1994, ISBN  0-8053-3170-0
Thomas G. Robertazzi, Computer Networks and Systems - Queueing Theory and Performance Evaluation, 1994, ISBN  0-387-94170-3
Robert J. Schalkoff, Artificial Neural Networks, 1997, ISBN  0-07-057118-X
 
 
 
 

Software Competition Chairs:
 

Nathan DeBardeleben
email: ndebard@parl.clemson.edu
Will Jones
email: wjones A__T parl DOT clemson DOT edu

Parallel Architecture Research Laboratory
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Clemson University
(864)-656-5927 or (864)-656-7223