Earlham College | News from Public Affairs

Brad Johnson-Stahlhut, Bryan Purcell, Andrew Fitz Gibbon and Nate Smith

Brad Johnson-Stahlhut (left), Bryan Purcell, Andrew Fitz Gibbon and Nate Smith took first place in the Scientific Computing Program Competition for students during SC07 in Reno. Earlham was the only liberal arts college represented in the student contest.

RICHMOND, Ind. — A team of four Earlham College undergraduates won first place in the Scientific Computing Program contest for students during the Education Program at SC07, one of the world's largest supercomputing conferences, held in November in Reno, Nev.

Earlham, the only liberal arts college in the student competition, was represented by the team of Andrew Fitz Gibbon, Nate Smith, Brad Johnson-Stahlhut and Bryan Purcell. The annual supercomputing conference brings together scientists working in high performance computing and computational science.

"This was my first time at a contest, and it was a very positive experience, one that I found to be educational as well as fun," says Johnson-Stahlhut, a junior from Richmond and a Web developer at Earlham. "It had the perfect combination of creativity and challenge."

Participants had nine hours to solve nine real world problems. Teams were gathered in one room for the competition, and each team could divide the work among its members.

"It was up to us who worked on which problems, so we chose to play to our strengths," says Fitz Gibbon, a junior from Wooster, Ohio.

Most of the problems required participants to write entirely new programs while others asked for analysis of existing programs. Teams had to be able to apply computational science programming skills to problems in other disciplines.

"I worked on one of the problems that was quite representative of scientific computing as a discipline," Smith says. "I designed a simulation that modeled the concentrations of a particular anti-depressant in the bloodstream of a mother with an unborn fetus. The purpose of the program was to run it enough times with different initial amounts of anti-depressant and dosage schedules to find the most optimal way to have the mother feel the effects of the drug without having a lethal concentration of it in the fetus."

Earlham's team was selected as the winner because it was judged to have made the best progress on more of the problems than the other competitors.

"We learned how to work through stress, which can be really hard because we are given problems in areas that we don't necessarily know anything about," says Smith, a sophomore from Pleasant Valley, N.Y.

In addition to the competition, Earlham's participants were able to expand their knowledge and skills through lectures and demonstrations at the SC07 conference. Each member of Earlham's team is a computer science major hoping to work in computer programming.

"I like the problem solving aspect of computer programming, following a problem through until it is resolved," says Purcell, a junior from Philadelphia.

Smith agreed, adding that the creative aspects of programming also appealed to him.

"Writing a program is like writing a story," Smith says. "You are getting the information from point A to point B, and you are making it useful to people, making it a reality."

Kevin Hunter '06 and Alex Lemann '06 served as the team's coaches at the SC07 competition. Hunter and Lemann continue their involvement with Earlham's Cluster Computing Group and are participating in the leadership of the SC Conference Education Program through 2010.

All of the costs associated with Earlham's participation at SC07 were covered by the conference organizers — the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Computer Society of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) — through their ongoing support of the Education Program.

Contact:
Mark Blackmon, director of media relations
765/983-1256 — E-Mail Mark