I wish them luck, but $55,000 split among "top programers" won't entice any programmers who are good at this stuff, they're extremely valuable.

This is also only open to US citizens, which greatly limits their choices.

Now, assuming that people do want to work on this, it's a lot of really difficult work! Back in the day when SGI sold supercomputers, I used to write this kind of parallel software, NASA was one of our customers, and I helped out with such problems, so I know what's involved. This is kind of like crowdsourcing a cure for a specific type of cancer, there's just too much special knowledge required which shrinks the "crowd" down to a few people.

Hey, SGI bought our company after John Rollwagen screwed us bigtime. We always joked that we could buy sgi with our pocket money...then John Rollwagen came along and sgi bought *our company* with their pocket money. I think my ex-wife ripped me off of my shares of stock while sgi controlled our stock investments...$100,000 worth.

But enough about *you*...