Besides Cell/B.E., the Programming Contest for GPU Just Started in Japan

January 28 was a deadline of application for “Cell Challenge 2009” of the Multi-core Programming Contest in Japan.

The specified assignment is "Calculation of Edit Distance between Two Character Strings." A champion will be determined by the sum of scores in the preliminary rounds and the final rounds. The final rounds will complete on March 20.

Three special interest groups in Information Processing Society of Japan lead and Kitakyushu Foundation for the Advancement of Industry, Science and Technology (FAIS) and four Cell/B.E. developers - Toshiba, etc., support the contest.

“GPU Challenge 2009” newly started on January 21 as an attached program with the Cell Challenge 2009. It is supported by the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC), Tokyo Institute of Technology, NVIDIA, and so on.

The specified problem of GPU Challenge 2009 is the same as the Cell Challenge 2009. Applicants should run their program on the computers with NVIDIA GPUs (equivalent to Tesla S1070-400) under a CUDA programming environment that the GPU Challenge 2009 executive committee provides. For the specified problem, an applicant has to use the computer implementing NVIDIA's GPU in Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC), Tokyo Institute of Technology.

The deadline of application and final program submission is February 13 and March 25 respectively.

In the almost same period as above, Fixstars which has been building up proven performances towards a Cell/B.E. total solution company is carrying out the Cell Programming Contest in Japan called “Hack the Cell 2009” by themselves.

This deadline of application and final program submission is January 31 and March 6 respectively.

The assignment of the Hack the Cell 2009 is "Optimization of Mersenne Twister Random Number Generator."

The champion of a student category will be awarded Fixstar's scholarship priority of 600kyen per year, and invitation to five-day travel to San Francisco.

Fixstar's CTO shows Japanese message on the contest's web site like this; "We are clearly lacking smarter programmers who can get great performances out of current high performance processors like Cell/B.E. Many programmers also are hidden without opportunities to demonstrate their superiorities. We can recognize that these situations should be serious problems and it is meaningful to provide opportunities for excellent programmers to be admired. "

Most of HPC people can agree with his message, I imagine.