A team from students from Pune, India, won the first prize of USD 5,000 for their project on Parallel Computing at the Imagine Cup Egypt ’09. The Imagine Cup is billed as the ‘World’s Premier Student Technology Competition’ and is organised by Microsoft Corp.
The competition is a challenge to youngsters to yoke their technology skills to work at solving some of the world’s toughest problems. This is the seventh year of existence for the Imagine Cup.
This year, more than 3 lakh students from 100 countries registered to be part of the Imagine Cup 2009.
The Pune-based team named Biollel was placed first in the Parallel Computing section. The three-member team includes Swati Gour, Shaizeen Aga & Akshay Galande, all of whom have just completed their engineering from College Of Engineering Pune, this May.
The project, according to the team, reduces the computational time for phylogenetic tree construction by efficiently implementing them in parallel so that we get performance benefits on multi-core platforms.
Phylogenetic Tree construction is crucial in drug design as well as protein structure prediction.