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• Imagine Cup Registrations

  Hello Everyone, Interest for the Imagine Cup has been strong and we can confirm the various categories are now open for competition. From experience we know that the next couple of months will be key in getting great UK representation in the Imagine Cup. Here are just a few of the reasons for  encouraging  your students to compete: - PR: The Imagine Cup attracts the attention of both regional and national newspapers, together with  technology and education press and news websites such as the BBC. Having students from your university compete in the Imagine Cup is great for raising the profile of your university in two important ways. Firstly it demonstrates the quality of your graduates to IT employers and makes them more attractive as employees (e.g. Dominic Green, UK winner of the 2008 competition) and secondly, it attracts new students to your university. - Skills Development: Fundamentally the Imagine Cup is about helping students get real world experience with Microsoft technology. The skills learned during the various competitions compliment their studies and are invaluable when students apply for jobs with IT companies. - Students Inspiration: With every technology interest area catered for, the competition is a great way to channel students’ passion for technology out of class. We want as many UK institutions and students to get involved with the Imagine Cup as possible, and to help you participate we provide: - Giveaways for students: Every week we give away web cams and Starbucks vouchers. We also hold a monthly draw for a Dell laptop, providing everything a student needs to see them through their studies and the Imagine Cup competition. - Donation of an Xbox 360 gaming lab kit for your university: The university with the most registrations will receive 4 Xbox 360s, 8 wired controllers and an assortment of the latest Xbox 360 titles. You are free to use them for XNA development or as a social/recreation area for students.  If you would like to receive regular updates on the registration numbers from your university then please let me know and I will happily send them to you. You can contact me by telephone (0118 909 3409) or if you prefer by email (mailto:ukacinfo@microsoft.com). And just to give you an idea of how we are doing so far, here are the top fifteen universities with the highest number of registrations:   University Registrations Brighton 89 Birmingham City 38 Cumbria 38 Bradford 37 Reading 35 Robert Gordon 35 Derby 31 Nottingham 24 De Montfort 23 Keele 23 Cambridge 20 Hull 20 Imperial College 20 Brunel 18 RHUL 20   If you would like to know more, them please email or telephone me. I’ll look forward to hearing from you. Good luck, Allison Posted Tuesday, December 09, 2008 6:44 AM from UK Academic Team Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: Events, Imagine Cup, XNA, Students, Technology, competitions, Academics, Embedded, Student, Games, Microsoft, Software design

• UK High Performance Computing Award

  Hello Everyone, The Windows Server HPC team have created a special award for UK Software Design competitors who use the Windows HPC Server in their Software Design solution of the Imagine Cup. Microsoft want to stimulate the thinking of UK students about how HPC can change the world.  We want students to think big, and to use the world’s fastest systems to solve the world’s biggest problems.  That’s what the HPC prize in the Imagine cup’s about. You know how mutli-core is about writing a program that uses more than one cpu?  Well HPC (High Performance Computing) is the next step up: it’s about programming for hundreds or thousands of CPUs.  This is for all the stuff that needs more compute than you can get from a single server.  Think about online gaming, when you have hundreds of people simultaneously modifying a visual database – that needs more power than you can get one a single CPU.  Think about calculating the temperature over 20,000 land sites in the UK and then projecting that forward into the future, one minute at a time, for 500 years.  This all needs heavy duty computing – and that’s HPC.  It’s the A380 of the computing world. To win the HPC prize you don’t need to have a working system – but tell us how your design would scale-out from one CPU to a thousand.  And explain how all that power would help.  The award will be given to the Software Design teams who demonstrate technical competency with HPC,  have a real world need for high performance computing and present the commercial viability of their implementation. HPC is used in lots of places – last year the two winners used HPC for genetic engineering and motorway design.  People in the UK use HPC for everything from theology to thermodynamics, archaeology to aerodynamics, gaming to genetics.  How could you use it? If you’ve got questions please contact your local HPC or SuperComputing Centre.  Or email Michael... Good luck and hope to see you at the finals. Best, Allison Posted Thursday, November 13, 2008 9:11 AM from UK Academic Team Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: Imagine Cup, Students, Technology, Student, Software, Microsoft