Today I completed the listing page for all of the presentations our research group PerWin at the University of Guelph has made in the last year or so. PerWin stands for Pervasive Computing and Wireless Networking Research. The group is directed by my advisor, Dr. Mieso Denko and has several graduate students who are active research members in the group. We have given presentations on topics ranging from Wireless Mesh Networks protocols, Autonomous networks, Fair Scheduling, Load Balancing, RFID, Wireless Security and much more. We have also had special invited talks by several faculty members from various Universities around Ontario (Ryerson, UOIT).

Reynolds Building @ University of Guelph where PerWin meets regularly

Check out the schedule page here for the list of presentations, presenters and topics. There are also listings of many of the websites for the presenters which may be a good resource for people interested in our work. If you are a faculty member interested in giving a talk contact Dr. Mieso Denko at the University of Guelph.

If you are interested in any of the talks I have given, all of the powerpoint presentations are available at my Academic Website at the University of Guelph.

Microwulf Cluster

Anyway, until I start to actually build thing I have decided that I would try to get suggestions through this blog and maybe through some forums on what materials I could use to get these motherboards organized in a reasonable way. (Note: I have extremely limited handyman type skills and a low budget since I’m a student.) Keep in mind that I need a way to not only house the motherboards but also power supplies, a couple of switches and maybe some hard drives. I have 15 working computers so far and do not want to use the standard pc cases because I don’t want a wall of computers in my house. Feel free to offer up any suggestions and check back soon for pictures of the progress!

Update: I have added a project page for the SCrappy Cluster

Once I get some time I think I’ll try it out. Since I’m on the topic of distributed screensavers… I seem to becoming more interested in distributed systems lately. The one that seems to be fascinating me the most is the DIY beowulf servers. I think this is because I just spent ages waiting for my last round of simulations because of one portion of the simulation that uses clique enumeration / maximal cliques. According to some papers I’ve quickly browsed over this problem is known to be hard to solve so perhaps I could make use of some sort of parallel solution to speed things up.

An example of a Brain-Computer-Interface

One interesting way I’ve heard it described both in the lecture and on the laboratory website is that is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. This definition seems strange to me because with the computers everywhere it almost is like the boundary between what is real and what is virtual becomes blurred.

What happens if in the future we can interface the computers with the human mind? While the definition of virtual reality is a human inside a computer created world, ubiquitous computing of the future could become a mix of computer created worlds and the imagination of the individual user. This area is quite interesting to me, and there are still many questions, perhaps this wil be a future area of research.