5 ms·

The prizes seem pretty low to me: $15k top prize for several months of work requiring a skillset that can easily land a 150k-plus-per-year salary. And no guara

by dzdt 9y ago

The prizes seem pretty low to me: $15k top prize for several months of work requiring a skillset that can easily land a 150k-plus-per-year salary. And no guarantees you get anything for your efforts. Edit: on the other hand graduate students and postdocs are notoriously underpaid and often have a lot of freedom in how they spend their summer time. I guess that is the target competitor pool?

goalieca 9y ago
Maybe there's a paper waiting for the grad student who cracks the problem?
walshemj 9y ago
And it doesn't say which Fortran they are using bog standard GFortran or Intel Fortran with all the parallel extensions. With this sort of code you also tune it to the machine architecture back when I did F77 for BT / Dialcom the code was tweaked to suit the PR!ME Architecture to get extra speed
- jheriko 9y ago
  when they say 'modern' fortran i take it to imply a a compiler and standard from sometime in the last 20 years. i've heard people refer to c90 as modern before.. (in the last two years) and the nasa/astronomy guys are famously clingy to 'known good' tech from the olden days. only the very most recent astronomical dataset i acquired was in .csv. everything is made for fortran from what i've seen over the last 10 years...
azhenley 9y ago
Grad students in CS can easily make over $30k at a summer internship (I've done several).
tanderson92 9y ago
The graduate students who can solve and win this problem are not underpaid.
photon-torpedo 9y ago
> for several months of work Not quite, the submission deadline is already in 8 weeks. And before you see any code, you need to go through their approval process, which they say takes several weeks. So you only have maybe 4 to 6 weeks to get the actual work done...
- killjoywashere 9y ago
  I am fairly certain there's a PhD organizer behind this who is well aware of the pain involved, spent over a year trying to set this up with the plan of having a 6 month competition window, and was shocked to find how much crap and delay they had to wade through just to get this out the door. That same organizer is now gnashing their teeth, realizing full well how the organization extracted all the value out of that 2-year grant just forcing the proposal through (the money no doubt expires on 30 September but NASA bean counters no doubt refuse to cut checks after 31 August, or maybe even 31 July). A hundred GS-7 employees, with an average education of a high school graduate, extracted the value of this poor bastard's grant with dozens of crappy PDF Standard Forms, emailed to distribution group of idiots and revised a dozen times each, and no, we can't even consider Form 2 until the President of these United States himself has signed off on Form 1. I gotta tell ya boys, working for the Government sucks, but if you don't start stepping up, you're going to find your government, complete with nuclear weapons and responsibility for your clean water and bridge safety, is totally run by complete idiots.
  - jheriko 9y ago
    well done for stepping up to the plate in that regard. i do not see this opinion espoused, nor lived by often enough today. kudos.

by dzdt 9y ago

goalieca 9y ago

Maybe there's a paper waiting for the grad student who cracks the problem?

walshemj 9y ago

And it doesn't say which Fortran they are using bog standard GFortran or Intel Fortran with all the parallel extensions. With this sort of code you also tune it to the machine architecture back when I did F77 for BT / Dialcom the code was tweaked to suit the PR!ME Architecture to get extra speed

jheriko 9y ago
when they say 'modern' fortran i take it to imply a a compiler and standard from sometime in the last 20 years. i've heard people refer to c90 as modern before.. (in the last two years) and the nasa/astronomy guys are famously clingy to 'known good' tech from the olden days. only the very most recent astronomical dataset i acquired was in .csv. everything is made for fortran from what i've seen over the last 10 years...

azhenley 9y ago

Grad students in CS can easily make over $30k at a summer internship (I've done several).

tanderson92 9y ago

The graduate students who can solve and win this problem are not underpaid.

photon-torpedo 9y ago

> for several months of work Not quite, the submission deadline is already in 8 weeks. And before you see any code, you need to go through their approval process, which they say takes several weeks. So you only have maybe 4 to 6 weeks to get the actual work done...

killjoywashere 9y ago
I am fairly certain there's a PhD organizer behind this who is well aware of the pain involved, spent over a year trying to set this up with the plan of having a 6 month competition window, and was shocked to find how much crap and delay they had to wade through just to get this out the door. That same organizer is now gnashing their teeth, realizing full well how the organization extracted all the value out of that 2-year grant just forcing the proposal through (the money no doubt expires on 30 September but NASA bean counters no doubt refuse to cut checks after 31 August, or maybe even 31 July). A hundred GS-7 employees, with an average education of a high school graduate, extracted the value of this poor bastard's grant with dozens of crappy PDF Standard Forms, emailed to distribution group of idiots and revised a dozen times each, and no, we can't even consider Form 2 until the President of these United States himself has signed off on Form 1. I gotta tell ya boys, working for the Government sucks, but if you don't start stepping up, you're going to find your government, complete with nuclear weapons and responsibility for your clean water and bridge safety, is totally run by complete idiots.
- jheriko 9y ago
  well done for stepping up to the plate in that regard. i do not see this opinion espoused, nor lived by often enough today. kudos.