The Blair Magnet Team composed of Andrew Das Sarma, Jacob Hurwitz, Anand Oza, Rohan Puttagunta, Chenyu Zhao, and alternate David Tolnay, tied for first place in the Student Programming Contest held on November 16 during the SC09 Conference Education Program in Portland, Oregon. The team was given eight hours to solve six problems involving methods to numerically find the minimum of complex non-linear functions, to find the entropy of various tilings in 2-D space, to encrypt and decrypt embedded messages efficiently, to benchmark a system for distributed memory computers, and to implement matrix multiplication for a multi-core system. The team competed against 7 other teams representing universities around the country. The other first place team represented the computer science department from the University of Delaware.