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FAIRMONT - Two young West Virginia high school students received awards recently in the first Captain Everett Norton Applied Mathematical Concepts Competition, a statewide contest sponsored by the Robert H. Mollohan Family Charitable Foundation and the West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation. The initiative encouraged junior and senior high school students to investigate and utilize math and technology in order to solve real-world problems and create innovative projects with new tools.
Jason Hooks, a junior at Bridgeport High School and the son of Mr. and Mrs. Steve Hooks of Bridgeport took first place. His program titled, "Change It," won Hooks $1,000 and a new computer. He was also awarded an internship at the West Virginia High Tech Consortium Foundation where he can further his interest in grid computing.
Second place was awarded to Zack Hutzell, son of Mr. and Mrs. Larry Hutzell of Fort Ashby. A senior at Frankfort High School, his project, "RSA Encryption and Factoring" brought him $750 and a personal digital assistant.
This year's competition centered on one of the hottest trends in the computing industry, namely grid computing: aggregating the computational capacity of disparately located computers to deliver supercomputing capacity to the desktop via the internet.
Computational grids are being used by researchers and businesses to solve computationally-intensive problems. By harnessing the power of thousands of computers to work in parallel, grids allow problems to be solved in days that would otherwise take decades.
West Virginia students interested in math and computer science were invited to participate in this selective competition. They were challenged to write grid computer applications that leveraged the power of the Global Grid Exchange. Winning applicants either had to perform a well-defined "deep" calculation or provide a "user capability." In either case, the project had to rely on computations that are not possible to be performed in a reasonable amount of time without the power afforded by a computational grid.
Students had the option to enter the competition as a team. A total of 13 students submitted their work in this year's competition. All projects were completed by March 18, 2005, and the participants presented their work to a panel of judges the week of March 21, 2005. Winners were honored at a reception on Friday, April 15.
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