Kickoff Conference

The Kickoff Conference at the New Mexico Tech in Socorro will be held on October 16-17.

Only one session will be held this year. For each student and teacher attending the Kickoff, room and board will be provided for by the Supercomputing Challenge. Attendance at the Kickoff is not required for participation in the Challenge. Attendance at the Kickoff will be limited to 300 students.

Keynote speaker

Amanda White received her B.S. at Old Dominion University in 1997, her M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001 and 2006, respectively, all in Civil and Environmental Engineering. She had been working as a postdoc at Los Alamos National Lab (2006-09) before becoming part of the New Mexico EPSCoR project. Amanda is now a postdoc at the New Mexico Tech with John Wilson. Her research interests include semi-arid hydrology, mountain hydrology, ecohydrology, and climate change impacts on all three. Recently, Amanda has studied the cause and hydrologic effects of the pinon pine tree mortality in the southwestern U.S. using data mining and traditional statistical techniques to examine various types of satellite data (photosynthetically-related data for vegetation, soil moisture, precipitation, etc.), in addition to physically-based models (tRIBS). As part of EPSCoR, she is currently developing surface-water models using USGS's Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (PRMS) for our three watersheds of interest: the Jemez River, Rio Hondo, and El Rito Basins. In the next year, she will link the developed surface water models to groundwater models (MODFLOW-2005) using USGS's GSFLOW. Then, the impacts of climate change on the groundwater/surface-water interactions will be examined using downscaled projections of climate data.

The picture is of Amanda at the La Jarra Creek Observatory (JACOB) in the Valles Caldera downloading stream flow information from HOBO data loggers we had deployed three months prior.

Schedule

The general schedule. Here are the detailed schedules.

Housing

Housing will be provided at local hotels in Socorro on a first come first served basis.

• Comfort Inn housing list: Artesia, Bloomfield, CEPi1, Cleveland, Deming, Desert Academy, Espanola, Freedom, Hatch Valley, Manzano, McCurdy, Navajo Prep, Penasco, Quemado, Red Mountain, Rio Gallinas, Robertson, Sandia Preparatory, Santa Fe, Sat Science and Math Acad, St Michaels and Volcano Vista.
• Days Inn housing list: AIMS@UNM, ATC, Bernalillo, Chaparral, Edgewood, Jackson, Monte del Sol and The MASTERS Program.
• Econo Lodge housing list: Albuquerque Academy, Aspen, Eldorado, La Cueva, Los Alamos High and Los Alamos Mid
• Super 8 housing list: Aldo Leopold, Annunciation, Las Montanas, LCPS, Mayfield, Melrose, Onate and Picacho.

Proposals

Remember that Supercomputing Challenge teams need to bring an Proposal with you to the kickoff. See Proposal hints. A Proposal template is to be filled out for each team, unless they are following the GUTS curriculum.

Class materials

Pictures

Check out the school pictures from the Kickoff, and the some class pictures from the Kickoff. Get the school/team pictures to your yearbook staff.

To learn more about previous year's kickoffs, visit our archive