UofBristol Student made parallel program easy

9:34 pm | Software, University of Bristol | No comment

James Hanlon, a PhD student undertaking a research project at the Department of Computer Science at University of Bristol, has invented programs that would help him write test software to explore chip to chip communication. Some major points covered include chip latency, barrier synchronizations, and an example program to show how easy it is to program in a parallel nature utilizing as many processors/cores as you need using XMOS and the XC programming language.

The XMP-64 is made up of 16 quad core G-series XMOS chips (64 processors in total) arranged in a hypercube allowing for very fast communication of data between processors (1.6 billion bits per second can flow between hypercube edges). The XMP-64 can therefore execute 25 billion instructions per second. Some applications a device such as the XMP-64 could be used in include: Image processing, Audio processing, Synthesizing, Communications, Packet inspection etc.

Cornell BOOM exhibits student projects

11:09 pm | Biology, Cornell, Gaming, Software | No comment

The annual Bits on Our Minds (BOOM) exhibition is showcasing technology projects varying from a small, self-guided robotic helicopter to a facial recognition program for tracking ancestry or to aid in searching for missing children.

Ethan Benanav, a computer science major of his project “Gamut”, a puzzle game where you figure out how to get past each level by changing the color of the world to make objects of that color disappear.

Michael Wilson of his project , “Project Vertex”, a game that uses the Wii remote that can track where the player’s head is in order to change the perspective of the 3-D virtual world, which allows you to use your own body as the controller. It won the Morgan Stanley Innovation Award.

Kevin Cheng, a biology major who is working on the only biological science research project at BOOM which is the “Genetically Engineering a Heavy Metal Biosensor” that has an objective to engineer an affordable biosensor to detect cadmium, a toxic heavy metal that contaminates irrigation water in developing nations.

Cornell scientist turns photos into 3-D buildings

10:49 pm | Architecture, Cornell, Software | No comment

A set of algorithms that generated three-dimensional models from unstructured collections of two-dimensional photos was enhanced by a Cornell computer scientist, Noah Snavely, while working on his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Washington.  PhotoCity, a new method that developed from his original work. There are teams of students at the University of Washington and Cornell that have been playing the PhotoCity game. The researchers plan to mix their system with a social game that allows teams to add images where they are necessary to enhance the visual models in order to improve the quality of the renderings. Researchers are planning to open it for public use to be able to gather three-dimensional renderings in cities like New York and San Francisco. An iPhone application that uses the phone’s camera, or upload collections of digital images can be used by the participators.

Kathleen Tuite, a University of Washington graduate student and a computer graphics researcher who is one of the designers of PhotoCity said that researchers are suggesting to award real prizes that would create incentives similar to Geocaching, the popular Internet GPS game.

Third Annual LLVM Developer’s Convention

7:46 pm | Software | No comment

With the support of Google who generously facilitated a fund for several students and active members of the LLVM community to be there at the meeting and present their LLVM-related work.

The Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) is a collection of libraries and tools that make it easy to build compilers, optimizers, Just-In-Timecode generators, and many other compiler-related programs.

Here is a short outline of the works of some of these developers and students:

Anton Korobeynikov, a long time developer, project administrator, and an LLVM code owner. A Ph.D student in applied statistics at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia, who presented an invaluable Tutorial on Building a Backend in 24 Hours. His tutorial is an outline of the various code generation phases, such as SelectionDAG, Register Allocation, and post register allocation. He goes into the different pieces of the backend that one will need to implement such as the target, subtarget, lowering, register set, instruction selection, and the calling convention.

Bruno Cardoso Lopes, a multi-year participant with the GSoC project, active LLVM contributor, and Ph.D. student at University of Campinas, Brazil. He presented Object Code Emission and llvm-mc this year that gave a sophisticated outline of the LLVM Machine Code Emitter and concentrated on the emission of object files. The driving force behind direct object code emission is to bypass the external assembler, and speed up compile time.

UT students sell business to BMC Software

7:16 pm | Software, University of Texas | No comment

Two of University of Texas master’s students, Daniel Nelson and Robert Reeves, created a software company that was bought by Houston-based BMC Software Inc.

The two students introduced Austin-based Phurnace Software Inc. in 2006 as part of a class project. The privately-held company that now has 21 employees. The privately-held company develops automation software meant to reduce cost, complexity and risks associated with configuring Java-based applications.

Phurnace products will be included in BMC’s BladeLogic Application Release Automation as part of the agreement.