YarcData Inc., a Cray company that is focused on providing “Big Data” graph analytics solutions to enterprise customers, today announced the official start of the YarcData Graph Analytics Challenge, which features $100,000 in prizes. Announced earlier this month, the YarcData Graph Analytics Challenge will recognize the best submissions for un-partitionable, Big Data graph problems as determined by the panel of judges.

The contest is now officially open, and contestants can review contest rules and submission criteria at http://yarcdata.com/graph-analytic-challenge.html and submit entries. The grand prize for the first place winner is $70,000. The second place winner will receive $13,000 and the third place winner will receive $8,000. There will also be prizes for the other finalists.

YarcData is holding the contest to showcase the increasing applicability and adoption of graph analytics in solving Big Data problems, and also to promote the use and development of RDF and SPARQL as the industry standard for graph analytics.

“This is an exciting chance to tap the creativity of the community to get past the misconception that graph computing is only about charting social tribes,” said Tony Baer, principal analyst at Ovum Research. “In actuality there are a host of complex problems across private and public sectors, driven by many-to-many relationships that have defied solution through conventional means. Competitions are a great way of showing that the solutions are real.”

“Critical problems today, including eScience, Social Media and Open Government Systems, are becoming more and more dependent on interacting with and understanding the relationships in the emerging Web of Data — which is basically a graph made by linking the data together,” added Jim Hendler, professor of computer science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “The maturing standards of RDF and SPARQL provide an effective way of handling these emerging data graphs, especially if they can be processed at Web Scales.”

“We believe RDF/SPARQL will be to graph analytics what SQL is to relational databases,” said Arvind Parthasarathi, President of YarcData.

The top six submissions will be selected on Sept.15, 2012, and the finalists will be offered time on YarcData’s uRiKA graph analytics appliance to run their queries. Winning submissions will be selected based on a set of criteria that includes the business and/or human impact, complexity, scalability and performance, and innovation.  Winners will be announced in a live web event on Dec. 6, 2012.

The contest will be open only to those individuals who are eligible to participate under U.S. and other applicable laws and regulations and whose submissions are in compliance with the contest rules. For more information, please visit http://yarcdata.com/graph-analytic-challenge.html.