Wittenberg University junior Brenton Bostick has been selected to present his paper "Parallelizing the Game of Life" at The Ohio State University Graduate Student Conference sponsored by OSU's High Performance Computing Division and the Ohio Board of Regents Aug. 2-3.

This unique summer program introduces Ohio's graduate students and advanced undergraduates of Ohio Supercomputer Centers (OSC) to computational resources and capabilities. The two-day event includes workshops covering topics such as UNIX, clusters, and structural analysis. Twenty-five students from around the state were accepted to participate in the conference. Only four out of the 25 students were selected to give oral presentations. Bostick is the only undergraduate selected to attend the conference. Representatives of OSC and the statewide users group selected papers to be presented.

Bostick, a computer science major and math minor, was chosen to give a 15 minute oral presentation at the conference after submitting his paper originally based on a research project for class. The paper discusses the computational universality and Turing-completeness of Life and similar systems. "Life" being a specific set of rules that yield interesting patterns on a computer.

"I am very excited to be selected for this conference," Bostick said. "I see it as a chance to expose other students to topics that I find interesting, not to mention spreading my name and that of Wittenberg around to an important group of scholars."

Bostick works part-time on Wittenberg's Web services team designing Web pages for the Summer Honors Institute and maintaining the Web pages for the math and computer science department, and is currently interning with NCR of Dayton for the summer as a technology systems analyst intern.

A native of Springfield, Brenton is the son of Monica and Steve Bostick.