[UCI-Calit2] Double Seminar Tuesday July 11 11:30 AM

Stuart Ross stuross at rgs.uci.edu
Mon Jul 10 14:22:16 PDT 2006


SEMINAR SERIES

Tuesday, July 11
Calit2 Building Auditorium

This event is the first in the series of four seminar events featuring
the work of faculty mentors for Calit2's interdisciplinary summer
research program for undergraduates, "SURF-IT".  Each event will feature
two speakers.  

Seminar begins 11:30 AM
An informal lunch will be served in the atrium after the seminar.

=============================

11:30 AM
		"The EcoRaft Project"
		Prof. William Tomlinson, Informatics
		Undergraduate Researchers:  Andrew Correa, Bryant
Hornick

This project involves the deployment and evaluation of an educational
museum exhibit built on a multi-device technological platform.  The
installation consists of three stationary computers that represent
virtual islands, and three mobile devices that represent rafts or boxes.
Each virtual island represents a different ecosystem.  The ecosystems
can be populated with hummingbirds, coral trees, and heliconia flowers.
Participants can use the mobile devices to transport species from one
island to another by bringing a mobile device near one of the stationary
computers.  This exhibit was designed in summer 2005 and exhibited at
SIGGRAPH 2005.  In 2006, the team will revise and extend the project to
enable it to withstand the rigors of use by thousands of persons per
year.  By transforming a research prototype into a robust and stable
exhibit, the project will explore research questions in engineering,
education and human-computer interaction design.

===========================
12:00 noon
		"High Performance Cooperative Data Distribution"
		Prof. Stephen Jenks, Electrical Engineering & Computer
Science
		Undergraduate Researcher:  J. Rick Ramstetter

Current large file transfer approaches used in high performance cluster
computing are point-to-point, normally based on GridFTP or Secure Copy
(scp).  If the file is to be disseminated to local disks on cluster
nodes, either each transfer happens separately or the connection to the
front-end becomes a bottleneck.  In either case, the overall
distribution time is proportional to the number of destinations times a
single transfer time.  With files in the tens becoming common, this time
becomes quite long.  Peer-to-peer filesharing offers a solution in the
form of BitTorrent, which allows receivers to send data as well, thus
multiplying the available bandwidth and decreasing download time of all
participants.  However, BitTorrent was designed for unreliable, shared,
slow home Internet connections and does not perform as well in
high-performance environments with gigabit or faster networks.  This
project will merge the best ideas from BitTorrent with advanced parallel
computing techniques to develop a cooperative data distribution approach
that will work within clusters and across research networks.  The goal
is to make the total transfer time to multiple nodes approach the single
transfer time of the file, which would be a significant improvement.



More information about the UCI-Calit2 mailing list