Lab hosts awards expo in April
More than 300 middle and high school students and 45 teachers representing 103 teams from throughout New Mexico are at the Glorieta Conference Center in Glorieta today for the 19th annual New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge kickoff conference.
The mission of the challenge is to be a nationally recognized program that promotes computational thinking in science and engineering so that the next generation of high school graduates is better prepared to compete in an information based economy, said David Kratzer of High Performance Computer Systems (HPC-3), the Laboratory's coordinator.
Through the challenge, teams of middle and high schools students use powerful computers to analyze, model, and solve real world problems, Kratzer added.
Participants will attend classes taught by instructors from Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories and other businesses and educational institutions in New Mexico.
Students spend the school year researching and programming a computational science project and have access to machines located at the laboratories. The teams will present their results at the challenge awards expo April 27-28, 2009 and earn scholarships and prizes at an awards ceremony at the Laboratory.
More information is on the Supercomputing Challenge Web page.
