[Beowulf-announce] CFP: GRIDWARS - Battle Program Contest

[Matt Oberdorfer]

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: GRIDWARS - Battle Program Contest 

GRIDWARS, a parallel programming challenge where competing battle
programs written in a parallel programming language fight for survival
of the fittest in a grid of processors. GRIDWARS was created to amplify
interest and enthusiasm in parallel programming and cluster computing.
The participating battle programs are written in the parallel
programming language CxC ("C by C"), which was designed to simplify the
modeling and simulation of a large number of interdependent elements,
their parallel dynamics and interactions. GRIDWARS is a so-called
CELLULAR AUTOMATA.

Hewlett-Packard is sponsoring the GRIDWARS parallel programming
challenge with prizes and systems. In GRIDWARS participating developers
submit CxC battle programs that will fight against each other for
control of parallel processors. The GRID WARS Championship takes place
in February on an HP Intel® Itanium® 2 cluster computing system running
Linux. The battle programs are developed under Windows. The HP-sponsored
prizes include an iPAQ Pocket PC, photosmart digital camera, and
all-in-one printer. The deadline for submissions is the February 14th.

http://www.gridwars.com

GRIDWARS was created by Engineered Intelligence Corporation to amplify
interest and enthusiasm in parallel programming using CxC. The basis for
Grid Wars is a two-dimensional grid of fully functional virtual parallel
processors.  Each processor is connected to its eight surrounding
neighbors and all processors run concurrently. In the beginning,
competitors' battle programs (written in the parallel programming
language CxC) are each placed on one randomly-selected processor in the
grid. Based on simple rules for winning "battles" for control of the
processors, each battle program can spread across the grid onto an
increasing number of processors. Each occupied processor runs the battle
program in parallel. Every time a competing program takes over a new
processor, its power increases.  When encountering an enemy, battle
programs fight against each other to finally take over the opponent's
processor. The program that conquers all processors in the grid is the
winner of the round.