Supercomputing Challenge inc info on Summer Intern Programs

Happy Monday!

This mild Indian summer weather feels delicious when you spend some time outdoors! Perhaps, we have "fall fever."

TO DO

Find a mentor. First try our database at http://challenge.nm.org/resources/mentors.shtml
Send them a letter similar to the one at
http://www.challenge.nm.org/resources/mentor_letter.html
If that doesn't work, contact consult@challenge.nm.org for assistance.
Winning teams tell us that having a mentor makes all the difference!

Create a team blog. Invite your mentor to join it. Kudos to Shane Wilson, Team 12 from Artesia and Sam Alva from Chaparral Mid for using the blogs.

Participate in the Challenge Discussion Groups at

http://mode.lanl.k12.nm.us/forum/?q=forum/19
Believe it or not, there is more activity in the restricted for Teachers only blogs than the student blogs.

Register for the 3rd Annual Young Researchers Banquet. See details at

http://www.gotoif.org/

Legislative Campaign We are asking teachers to adopt at least one legislator. Ask your teacher how you and your parents or guardians can help. Teachers, please let Consult know if you have heard from any of your adoptees.

SPONSOR LINK http://sandia.gov/

This week we are highlighting one of our primary sponsors, Sandia National Lab. A big thank you goes to them for supplementing our administrative costs for the next year! They send facilitators and scientists to the kickoff and many of our mentors and judges come from Sandia.
We just received word that we are getting an annual grant of $10,000 from Lockheed Martin.
Through this grant, we can invite you to a Sandia Tour next March. There are summer intern programs you can take advantage of from age 16 to Ph.D level. http://sandia.gov/employment/special-prog/index.html

Thanks, Sandia for helping make the Challenge a reality! Special thanks at this time to Sandians James Perry, Eleanor Walther, and Eric Debenedictis, and Bill Blackler, President of the Challenge Board of Directors and David Kratzer, LANL and Consult.

WEBSITE GUIDE

This week we are highlighting our Sponsor page at

http://challenge.nm.org/sponsors.shtml

If you ever run into anyone who works for these companies, labs, businesses or schools, please thank them for their continued effort!

Can you figure out what we mean by Primary, Educational, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Friends' sponsors?

SCIENCE LINK

We have discussions with the Challenge Board of Directors, Consult and Challenge Sponsors about changing our name. We, the Consult Management team, believe that our name has recognition and even though each project or unit doesn't use a supercomputer, we are all involved in computational science and/or agent based modeling.

Your current desktop is more powerful than the supercomputers in 1990 when we started this program. We like you to know the uses of supercomputing and the power, opportunities and jobs they provide for our state.

A few of our teams do use a supercomputer in their final projects. We hope to put more Supercomputing into the Challenge with our anticipated relationship with the NM Computing Applications Center, the new 170 teraflop machine in Albuquerque. (What's a teraflop? Wikipedia says, "In computing, FLOPS (or flops or flop/s) is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second. The FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance , especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating point calculations; similar to instructions per second.)

Here is an introduction to Supercomputing:

http://www.thocp.net/hardware/supercomputers.htm

Here's hoping you have been researching your project or unit and that you have found a mentor.


Consult Management Team
Betsy, Celia and David

Supercomputing Challenge Consulting, consult@challenge.nm.org