Messing with Supercomputers

New Mexico Business Journal, June, 2001

Several of the world's fastest supercomputers are housed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, as you might expect. What you might not expect is that the Lab makes them available, after a fashion, to New Mexico high school kids. That's the reason for the annual Supercomputing Challenge, which this year saw entries from 30 schools.

This year's winner was a team from Sandia Prep in Albuquerque, which developed a program called "Parallel Processing of Human Genomic Leukemia Data Using Neural Net works," which certainly sounds impressive. This particular team, incidentally, neatly demolishes the notion that computer mavens are usually males. The winning members are Joan Goldsworthy, Joelle Jones and Heather Wood. The Challenge, now in its eleventh year, is sponsored by LANL and New Mexico Technet.