Bio-IT World and Orion MultiSystems are teaming up to launch the Personal Supercomputing Contest. The winning life science entry will receive approximately four years of CPU time to apply to a computational problem in the life sciences.

The Personal Supercomputing Contest, which was announced at the 2005 Bio-IT World Conference + Expo, will collect applications until August 1. After rigorous judging, one entry will be chosen, and the winning application will be awarded about two weeks of runtime on an Orion MultiSystems DS-96 -- a 96-node deskside cluster. That translates into 3.68 CPU compute years of processing power.

"Orion has chosen the life sciences community for our first Personal Supercomputing Contest because of the great fit of common genomics, cheminformatics, and systems biology problems to our platform," says Juli Nash Moultray, industry marketing director at Orion MultiSystems.

Contest applications will be judged on three criteria: relevance of the problem to the life sciences, the innovative nature of the problem, and whether the proposed problem to be solved fits into the compute timeframe allocated.

Judging will be done jointly Bio-IT World and Orion MultiSystems. Stu Jackson, Orion's manager of application engineering and former director of bioinformatics at Incyte, will be one of the contest's judges and ensure that the winning application runs properly on the DS-96.

Jackson notes that "Bio-IT World was the obvious choice as a partner for this contest. It is a vital conduit to IT professionals in the life sciences. I sure read it when I was at Incyte."

The contest winner will be notified in early September. With Jackson's help, the winners will receive about two weeks of runtime on the DS-96 during September. Bio-IT World anticipates covering the results later this fall, probably around the time of the SC2005 Supercomputer Conference that will be held in Seattle in November.

This page has complete information on how to enter the Personal Supercomputing Contest.