Researcher Awards

Researcher Awards

Four awards will be given to deserving posters at the conclusion of the Mind Bytes event. Posters will be evaluated by a panel of accomplished judges.

The Research Computing Center Mind Bytes Award for Visualization in Research

This award, given in memory of Kathleen A. Zar, acknowledges the research team whose poster offers the most compelling utilization of RCC resources to uniquely visualize scientific research. Contestants will be evaluated on the novelty of the technology that they implement; the level of difficulty of their visualization; and the technical use of RCC resources to produce the visualization.
The winner of the award will receive formal recognition of his or her accomplishment and a NVIDIA K40c Active Fan Tesla GPU.

The Research Computing Center Mind Bytes Award for Performance and Scalability

The performance and scalability prize will be awarded to a researcher whose poster demonstrates the best implementation and performance of RCC's Midway compute cluster. Performance tuning and parallelization of codes are becoming increasingly important in order to effectively use modern hardware and implement complex algorithms. The judges are not just interested in code that runs on the greatest number of cores but the code that are best tuned to the existing hardware and/or demonstrates the greatest performance speed-up when scaled.
The winner of the award will receive formal recognition of his or her accomplishment and an Apple iPad Air.

The Research Computing Center Mind Bytes Award for Big-Data Research

The big-data prize will be given to the poster that shows research that utilizes extremely large data sets relative to the field of study and that fulfills the four Vs of big-data research: volume, velocity, veracity, and variety. The judges will evaluate not just the size and scope of researchers' data but also the novelty of how they extract knowledge from the data and the efficiency and innovation with which it is processed on the Midway compute cluster.
The winner of the award will receive formal recognition of his or her accomplishment and a 1TB Lacie portable hard drive.

The Mind Bytes Attendees' Choice Award

Throughout the afternoon Mind Bytes attendees will have several opportunities to browse the poster gallery. Guests will be able to cast votes for their favorite posters using voting stations set up at the event and through the Mind Bytes website using a unique login.
The winner of the award will receive formal recognition of his or her achievement and a dinner for two at a local Hyde Park restaurant.

Remember to submit posters by Monday, October 13th.