The $300,000.00 USD Divide and Conquer Challenge seeks solutions to improve the execution speed of models that simulate flow hydraulics and sediment transport in rivers and reservoirs. The challenge is hosted by Freelancer in partnership with the Bureau of Reclamation and NASA Tournament Lab. To participate in Phase 1 of the challenge, solvers will need to create or adapt an existing parallelized or parallelizable linear equation sparse matrix solver (LESMS) and demonstrate its performance.

Enter now for the chance to win a portion of the Phase 1 $100,000 prize purse.

Reclamation’s Sedimentation and River Hydraulics Group studies how rivers and reservoirs have or will respond to changes in river flow, sediment supply, or channel modification. Currently, engineers and scientists use Reclamation’s own incomplete lower-upper conjugate gradient solver (ILU-CGS) to solve two- and three-dimensional models on PCs. Reclamation’s solver is very stable but because it is hard for it to be parallelized efficiently, it only runs on a single-core and therefore it is slow for large problems. The Divide and Conquer Challenge seeks to replace Reclamation’s existing Sedimentation and River Hydraulics 2D (SRH-2D) model with a parallelized version that incorporates newly developed LESMS from the Challenge.