---
title: "OpenPOWER Developer Challenge Finalists Announced"
date: "2016-10-01"
categories: 
  - "blogs"
tags: 
  - "featured"
---

_By Calista Redmond, President, OpenPOWER Foundation_

https://youtu.be/55MtoqycQGM

Recently at [IBM Edge](https://ibmgo.com/edge2016) I had the pleasure of announcing the Finalists of the 2016 [OpenPOWER Developer Challenge](http://openpower.devpost.com/).   From the kick-off of this global challenge in the Spring – a first-ever for the OpenPOWER Foundation – to the many MeetUps and Google Hangouts where we met Developers and Challenge participants around the world, it’s been a fantastic journey, and it’s not over yet.

Hundreds of Developer Challenge participants worked throughout the summer using the [SuperVessel Developer Cloud](https://ptopenlab.com/cloudlabconsole/) to port, optimize, accelerate and scale HPC, Big Data & Analytics and Deep Learning applications on OpenPOWER.  They had access to hardware acceleration technologies including [NVIDIA GPUs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn5IpPHfuxk) and [FPGAs from Xilinx](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq93jQmCuLU), advanced development tools and programming frameworks [including the IBM XL Compilers](https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/groups/service/html/communitystart?communityUuid=572f1638-121d-4788-8bbb-c4529577ba7d) and the [Linux on Power SDK](https://www-304.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/lopdiags/sdklop.html), and programming frameworks like Apache Spark and the [OpenPOWER Deep Learning Software Distribution](https://openpowerfoundation.org/blogs/deep-learning-options-on-openpower/).

The six projects qualifying as Finalists are:

- [Emergency Prediction on Spark](http://devpost.com/software/emergencypredictiononspark): Antonio Carlos Furtado from the University of Alberta predicts Seattle emergency call volumes with Deep Learning on OpenPOWER
- [Medical Ultrasound on CAPI](http://devpost.com/software/medical-ultrasound-imaging-acceleration-based-on-capi): South China University accelerates Delay-and-Sum with POWER and CAPI-attached FPGAs to bring more speed to Cloud-based medical imaging
- [OpenRBC Simulation](http://devpost.com/software/openrbc): Brown University gets closer to cracking the code on Red Blook Cell disorders using computational models on OpenPOWER.
- [TensorFlow Cancer Detection](http://devpost.com/software/distributedtensorflow4cancerdetection): Altoros Labs brings a turbo boost to automated cancer detection with OpenPOWER.
- [ArtNet Genre Classifier](http://devpost.com/software/artnet-genre-classifier): Praveen Sridhar and Pranav Sridhar turn OpenPOWER into an art connoisseur.
- [Scaling Up and Out a Bioinformatics Algorithm](http://devpost.com/software/scaling-up-and-out-a-bioinformatics-algorithm): Delft University of Technology advances precision medicine by scaling up and out on OpenPOWER.

All six of these projects will be awarded either a Grand, 2nd or 3rd Prize – stay tuned for the Grand Prize and rankings announcement during the upcoming [OpenPOWER Foundation Summit in Barcelona](https://openpowerfoundation.org/openpower-summit-europe/).  Finally, plan to join the Grand Prize winners with IBM and OpenPOWER at [SC16](http://sc16.supercomputing.org/) in Salt Lake City.

In 2016 Developers became the stars of the OpenPOWER Foundation, and this is just the beginning! Want to learn more about developing on Power? Visit the new [Linux on Power Developer Portal](https://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/).