Geniuses Wanted: NASA Challenges Coders to Speed Up Its Supercomputer

Like many "hackathons" and "competitions", this event will gather useful creative work from a large pool of participants. Only a handful of "winners" will actually get paid for their effort, and not very well either, given the challenging and highly technical nature of the project.

In creative professions, unpaid work like this is often called "spec work". Employing or encouraging spec work is an unethical business practice: http://www.nospec.com