MRI 0215836: Wireless, Wired and Distributed Computing

Papers, research projects related to this grant

• Gaby Jonatan worked on a project investigating the distributed coloring algorithm described by Finocchi, Panconesi, and Silvestri in "Experimental Analysis of simple, distributed vertex coloring algorithms" (SODA 2002). Gaby concentrated on getting the algorithm simulated in NS2 and over the wireless cluster. Her ns code is html-ized here.

• Matt Kelley worked on interesting configurations for clusters.
  • The XBox Cluster. He had some help from Michelle Lyman and Gaby Jonatan as he painted and assembled them.
  • The Flat Neighborhood Network, used in our second wired beowulf cluster.

• Juicio Brennan worked on the XAVE, a CAVE automatic virtual environment. This work made up his senior project.

• Michelle Lyman worked on several projects related to the grant.
  • Along with Matt Kelley, she worked on building the wired cluster.

  • Michelle also put together the wireless (aka the infectious disease cluster) cluster, but we don't have pictures of that.

  • Michelle spent a lot of time working on Genetic Programming and presented at NCUR and GECCO(June 2005, Genetic Programming for Associations on Card Sort Data, poster presented with Michelle Lyman at GECCO 2005, Washington, D.C.). Michelle also presented her work at Xavier's Celebration of Student Research in Spring 2005.

• Marco Fautzzo used the cluster to perform around 350,000 numerical simulations of orbital stability. This work resulted in the paper "A Statistical Stability Analysis of Inclined Earth-like Planetary Orbits in Binary Systems", by M. Fatuzzo, F. C. Adams, R. Gauvin, and E. M. Proszkow, which is being submitted to to The Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in Spring 2006. Rich Gauvin is the student who is particularly involved in this project; his work was presented in Xavier's Celebration of Student Research in Spring 2005 and may be presented at NCUR in Spring 2006.

• An outgrowth of this project is the "cash register cluster" which is just getting started. Xavier CS Alum Liam Randall donated around 100 old cash registers which actually have pretty solid computing specs. We're hoping to get this going during Spring 2006.