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  Background and Information   Winning Projects Details

Discover the potential of Cell Broadband Engine™(Cell/B.E.)

On February 5th 2007, IBM launched a one of its kind initiative to proliferate Cell/B.E. technology while providing an opportunity to students to showcase their skills and understanding of multi-core architecture. The response has been overwhelming and very positive, resulting in some innovative submissions from students.

The winner details are mentioned below. The background of this initiative, ground rules, etc can also be found as you browse through the rest of the site.


Region 1(Americas) Winners Details
Position Title Student Name University
Grand Prize Brain Circuit Bottom-Up Engine Simulation and Acceleration on Cell BE, for Vision Applications Jayram Moorkanikara Nageswaran University of California, Irvine, USA
Ashok Chandrashekar Neukom Institute for Computational Science,Dartmouth College, USA
2nd Place MapReduce for the Cell Architecture Marc de Kruijf University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
3rd Place C-Ray: Interactive Volume Ray Casting Library For Cell/B.E Jusub Kim University of Maryland, College Park, USA
4th Place Implementation of Fast object detection on Cell/B.E. Roberto Hiramatsu, Jussara Kofuji University of São Paulo, Brazil

Region 2(Europe, Asia Pacific) Winners Details
Position Title Student Name University
Grand Prize Exact CT Reconstruction on Cell Broadband Engine Architecture Zhenxing Han, Yannan Jin, Liji Cao, Qing He, Si Chen and Xueming Yu Shanghai Jiaotong University
2nd Place Multi-resolution Texture Synthesis on Cell/B.E. Wei Tong, Shien Deng and Gang Pan School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin University
3rd Place H264 Real Time encoding on Cell/B.E. Yao Zou, Xun He, Xianmin Chen and Lei Zhu Shanghai Jiaotong University
4th Place A Novel Grid Space with Cell Powered Qi Lv, Chunfeng Si and Tao Yan Nanjing University

Dates
Phase Date Hour
(Eastern time zone)
Challenge 1 begins February 05, 2007 12:00 AM
Challenge 1 ends March 31, 2007 11:59 PM
Challenge 2 begins February 05, 2007 12:00 AM
Challenge 2 ends (judging begins) July 05, 2007 11:59 PM
Winners announced On or about Sept 05, 2007

Participating countries
Geography Countries
[Region 1]

Americas:
Canada (excluding Quebec), Brazil, and U.S.A
[Region 2]




Europe:
Belgium, Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Russia, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, U.A.E., U.K.

Asia Pacific:
China, India

Prizes: Region 1
Category Prizes
Challenge 1
[Cell/B.E. Trivia]
t-shirt

T-shirt — The first 300 students in each region that successfully complete Challenge 1 and pass the online quiz will each receive a seriously cool t-shirt.
Challenge 2
[Top Innovator]

A total of four Challenge 2 prizes will be awarded. The actual prizes awarded will differ based upon a student’s geography.

For winning students in the U.S. and Canada
(excluding Quebec):

Grand Prize : $10,000 USD.

Second Place Prize : $7,500 USD.

Third Place Prize : $5,000 USD.

Fourth Place Prize : $2,500 USD.

For winning students in Brazil:

Grand Prize:
Approx. retail value: $9,631.36 USD

  • 1 ThinkPad Series X Tablet (6363A7PSM)
  • 1 Webcam Live Motion Titanium (Creative Labs)
  • 1 DigiMemo A502 - Eletronic Notepad
  • 1 Portable Wi-Fi Router 3Com 802.11b/g
  • 1 SD Card Imation 1Gb
  • 1 Compact-Flash Dane-Elec 1Gb
  • 1 iPod Video 30Gb
  • 1 Palm Tungsten TX.

Second Place Prize:
Approx. retail value: $7,223.52 USD

  • 1 ThinkPad Series X Tablet (6363A7PSM)
  • 1 Portable External HDD 40Gb USB 2.0 Iomega

Third Place Prize:
Approx. retail value: $4,815.68 USD

  • 1 Notebook ThinkPad T60 (1951AB5SM).

Fourth Place Prize:
Approx. retail value: $2,407.84 USD

  • 1 ThinkCentre M52 (8212G4P00)

Prizes: Region 2
Category Prizes
Challenge 1
[Cell/B.E. Trivia]
t-shirt

T-shirt — The first 300 students in each region that successfully complete Challenge 1 and pass the online quiz will each receive a seriously cool t-shirt!
[Design shown on the left; printed on the back of the shirt]
Challenge 2
[Top Innovator]
A total of four Challenge 2 prizes will be awarded.

Grand Prize : $10,000 USD.

Second Place Prize : $7,500 USD.

Third Place Prize : $5,000 USD.

Fourth Place Prize : $2,500 USD.


The Cell Broadband Engine: Background

The Cell Broadband Engine and Cell Broadband Engine Architecture(CBEA) are the result of a collaboration between Sony, Toshiba, and IBM, known as STI, formally started in early 2001. The CBEA grew from a challenge to provide power-efficient and cost-effective high-performance processing for a wide range of applications, including the most demanding consumer appliance: game consoles.

Cell/B.E. Processor is an innovative solution whose design was based on the analysis of a broad range of workloads in areas such as Cryptography, Graphics Transform and Lighting, Physics, Fast-Fourier transforms (FFT), Matrix Operations, and Scientific Workloads.

The CBEA and the Cell/B.E. Processor implementation have been designed to enable fundamental advances in processor performance. These advances are expected to support a broad range of applications in both commercial and scientific fields. To name a few, Seismic Computing, Aerospace and Defense, Medical Imaging, Digital Media & Digital Content Creation, Digital Video Surveillance, Electronic Design and Automation, etc.


Please Note
  • This is an overview, not a full representation of the rules and requirements of the Cell/B.E. University Challenge 2007. Please refer to the Contest Rules page for a complete list of rules and eligibility requirements.
  • Contest details, rules, and eligibility might differ for different geographies.

"Cell Broadband Engine" is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc., in the United States, other countries, or both and is used under license therefrom.

Cell/B.E. resources
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Cell/B.E. Processor Software Development Kit

Cell/B.E. Processor documentation at IBM Microelectronics

Cell/B.E. Processor Resource Center at developerWorks

Cell/B.E. Processor Developers Corner at power.org

Linux info at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center website

Online virtual cell programming classes at IBM Education Assistant


Launch webcast

Listen to IBM Executive Vice President, Innovation and Technology, Nick Donofrio’s Webcast to learn how IBM will inspire thousands of students worldwide to participate in the Cell/B.E. University Challenge ’07.


Related sites

Power Architecture

Cell/B.E. Processor workshop at IBM Innovation Centers for Business Partners

The Cell/B.E. Processor project at IBM Research

The Cell/B.E. Processor at IBM alphaWorks

The IBM BladeCenter QS20


Promotional materials

Brochure for Cell B.E. University Challenge 2007

Poster for Cell B.E. University Challenge 2007


Questions?

Have technical questions about Cell/B.E. Processor technology? Visit the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture forum to post a question.