Daniel Wright beat more than 500 entrants. The final rounds, held in at the University Park Hotel @MIT, in Cambridge, Mass., featured the top 16. Students are given a specific problem and devise code to fix it.

"It's really nice to win after making the semifinals in last year's Collegiate Challenge and finishing second in the Invitational (another annual contest run by TopCoder)," Wright said.

The Lafayette, Colo., native thanked Sun and TopCoder for sponsoring an event that sharpened his Java programming skills and positioned him a great job upon graduation.

Wright beat Ling Li, California Institute of Technology; Dan Adkins, University of California-Berkeley; and Joe Nievelt, Michigan Technological University, in the final round.

"Daniel is arguably the top-collegiate computer programmer in the country," said Jack Hughes, founder and chairman of TopCoder. "Winning a competition that brought together the top 512 collegiate programmers is a tremendous accomplishment."

Semi-finalists were: Ben Wilhelm (Oberlin College), Tom Sirgedas (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor), Nathan Paymer and Po-Shen Loh (California Institute of Technology), James Esser (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities), Trayton Otto (Georgia Tech), Logan Hanks (Virginia Tech),Jon Salz (MIT), Eugene Davydov and Ante Derek (Stanford), Jeremy Haubold (Purdue), and AmbroseFeinstein (University of Central Florida).

Based in Glastonbury, Conn., TopCoder uses the results of the Collegiate Challenge, along with its annual Invitational Tournament, and other weekly competitions, to create a database of talented student and professional programmers.

Sun is a Santa Clara, Calif.-based networking equipment giant.

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