Hewlett-Packard is sponsoring the GRIDWARS parallel programming challenge with prizes and systems. In GRIDWARS participating developers submit CxC battle programs that will fight against each other for control of parallel processors. The GRID WARS Championship takes place in February on an HP Intel® Itanium® 2 cluster computing system running Linux. The battle programs are developed under Windows. The HP-sponsored prizes include an iPAQ Pocket PC, photosmart digital camera, and all-in-one printer. The deadline for submissions is the February 14th.

http://www.gridwars.com

GRIDWARS was created by Engineered Intelligence Corporation to amplify interest and enthusiasm in parallel programming using CxC. The basis for Grid Wars is a two-dimensional grid of fully functional virtual parallel processors. Each processor is connected to its eight surrounding neighbors and all processors run concurrently. In the beginning, competitors' battle programs (written in the parallel programming language CxC) are each placed on one randomly-selected processor in the grid. Based on simple rules for winning "battles" for control of the processors, each battle program can spread across the grid onto an increasing number of processors. Each occupied processor runs the battle program in parallel. Every time a competing program takes over a new processor, its power increases. When encountering an enemy, battle programs fight against each other to finally take over the opponent's processor. The program that conquers all processors in the grid is the winner of the round.