Today NVIDIA and TopCoder launched the first contest in the CUDA SuperHero Challenge.

The first contest challenges participants to develop the highest performing solution for GPU-Accelerated Connected Component Labeling of images. CCL is a simple but computationally intensive image processing operation that is used in many applications including machine vision, real-time object recognition, and security.

TopCoder is a large community of over 200,000 members of which over 32,000 have been active participants in the last 90 days. Anyone can register to be a TopCoder to participate in the CUDA SuperHero Challenge.  Contestants around the world will be competing for some hard cash – and also the opportunity to be TopCoder’s first CUDA SuperHeroes.

The challenge is simple to understand and in fact simple to get a first implementation up and running;  but winning will take plenty of CUDA skill as the challenge will exercise many CUDA optimization techniques.

The winners will be announced at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference at the end of September. See the contest details here.