News

Students Win Scientific Programming Contest

A group of our students (Fitz, Nate, Brad, and Bryan) won the Education Program's Science Programming Contest at SC07, the Supercomputing Conference, in early November. Earlham's press release describing this amazing feat is here.

Annual Applied Groups Information Meeting

Computer Science Applied Groups
Information Meeting
PIZZA
Monday 3/Dec, 12:00pm
Dennis 214

]]> The CS Applied Groups provide infrastructure support for the CS Department
and the College as a whole. This is your chance to get substantial real-world
experience working on things that your fellow students depend on every day.

These groups are open to all students, at all levels. In most cases
preference is given to those intending to major in CS. Group members commit to
working 10 hours/week during the semester, usually as workstudy, for a term of
at least three semesters, starting in the Spring. Nearly all CS majors work in
one or more of these groups at some time.

The current groups are:
o CS System and Network Administrators
o Hardware Interfacing Project
o CS Content Administration Group
o Pedagogical Tools Group
o Database Integration Group (WebDB)
o Green Science Group
o Earlham Computing Services System Administration
Additional groups are in planning.

There will be a meeting for prospective group members as well as all current
group members this Monday, 3/Dec., at Noon in Dennis 214. If you have any
interest in working in these groups, even if you are not sure if your
circumstances will permit it, please attend. Pizza and drinks will be
provided.

To help us plan how much pizza to order, please send e-mail to Mary Lou
Rosser (rossema@earlham.edu) to let her know you are coming. When you do,
please let her know of any dietary restrictions and/or topping preferences you
have.

If you have any questions, contact me, Jim Rogers (jrogers@cs.earlham.edu).

Plowshares Volunteer Opportunity

There is an opportunity to help out with a plowshares digital archive interface, which is experiencing some problems. See

http://www.cs.earlham.edu/applied-groups/content/jobsblog/archives/000443.html

Ultimate Geek

Check out the Intel publicity video touting their contribution of a $30,000 cluster to Earlham (And, not incidentally, touting the way that Charlie is using it at Earlham and in programs in the wider CS community):

http://cluster.earlham.edu/movies/Intel_HPC_Geek.wmv

Lounge Printer is Back

The Math/CS Lounge printer (lp0, use -Plp0 in your command) is back up. Send mail to admin (at cs.earlham.edu) if you have problems with it. Paper for this printer is available from MaryLou in the Physics/Math/CS Dept. office.

New Internship Opportunity on Job Blog

Project Vote smart is offering internships in their IT department. The full story can be found on our jobs blog.

Cluster Stuff

The Cluster Computing Group (in the bodies of Alex Lemann, Kevin Hunter, and Charlie Peck) recently attended SIAM's Computational Science and Engineering conference in Costa Mesa, California. They presented a poster on computational science education and worked on their OpenMPI benchmarking project while they were there. They'll be back in California next month to attend a workshop at the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine, and again in April to teach a workshop at the San Diego Super Computing Center. During the first week in March they, hopefully along with a bunch of Earlham CS students, will be at the ACM's computer science education conference in Covington, Kentucky.

If you've read this far you must be bored; in that case there's a podcast of Charlie talking about computational science education recently on a local NPR station here: feed://www.wmub.org/rss/TalkShows.xml

Micah's first game

This from Micah Acinapura, a recent CS grad: "I recently got a new job programming games for the xbox360 at a company called Gaia Industries. The game I'm working on now is being published by EA (Electronic Arts, one of the worlds largest video game publishers), and they just put out the press release for it. The game is called "Wing Commander Arena" and it will be the first major game that I have made. Here are some links from some press that we got today, and the last link has screen shots of the game. We're still working hard on the game but it should be comming out around June."

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=12861
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/sim/wingcommanderarena/screenindex.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=gsimage

CSLounge Printer Down

> For the last few days the cslounge printer hasn't been working. I try to
> print, and get no error message, but nothing happens. lpstat -p lp0
> gets ... ERROR: too many errors

Thanks for letting us know. We've been working on getting it back up
but we can't quite place what's going on. The error you aren't
seeing is a timeout error and we're trying to track that down.

For the time being, you can use the D224 printer (use: -Plp1).
- ---------------------------
Andrew Fitz Gibbon (Fitz)
EC-CS Systems Administrator

ECS Network Interruptions

From: Tom Steffes

ECS will be performing a planned replacement of the core network
switch on Thursday Evening. We will begin the replacement work
sometime between 6:00 and 7:00pm once all administrative offices
have closed for the evening.

We will be trying to minimize network downtime by moving the old
switch to the side and continuing to keep the network up while we
install the new switch. Once the new one is in place, we will then
begin moving the connections over at which time there may be some
network disruptions. Possible disruptions could include temporary
loss of connection to the Earlham network from outside the campus
as well as loss to on campus resources and the Internet from on
campus.

We will do our best to keep these to a minimum, but please be aware
that problems may occur.

The network should be up and stable by Friday morning.

Applied Groups Information Meeting

There will be a meeting for prospective Applied Group members as well as all current group members this Thursday, 30/Nov., at Noon in Dennis 214. If you have any interest in working in these groups, even if you are not sure if your circumstances will permit it, please attend. Pizza and drinks will be provided.

To help us plan how much pizza to order, please send e-mail to Mary Lou Rosser (rossema@earlham.edu) to let her know you are coming. When you do, please let her know of any dietary restrictions and/or topping preferences you have.

]]> Computer Science Applied Groups
Information Meeting
Thursday 30/Nov, 12:00pm
Dennis 214

The CS Applied Groups provide infrastructure support for the CS Department and the College as a whole. This is your chance to get substantial real-world experience working on things that your fellow students depend on every day.

These groups are open to all students, at all levels. In most cases preference is given to those intending to major in CS. Group members commit to working 10 hours/week during the semester, usually as workstudy, for a term of at least three semesters, starting in the Spring. Nearly all CS majors work in one or more of these groups at some time.

The current groups are:

CS System and Network Administrators
Hardware Interfacing Project
CS Content Administration Group
Pedagogical Tools Group
Database Integration Group (WebDB)
Green Science Group

Additional groups are in planning.

There will be a meeting for prospective group members as well as all current group members this Thursday, 30/Nov., at Noon in Dennis 214. If you have any interest in working in these groups, even if you are not sure if your circumstances will permit it, please attend. Pizza and drinks will be provided.

To help us plan how much pizza to order, please send e-mail to Mary Lou Rosser (rossema@earlham.edu) to let her know you are coming. When you do, please let her know of any dietary restrictions and/or topping preferences you have.

If you have any questions, contact me, Jim Rogers (jrogers@cs.earlham.edu).

Clusterers in the Register

LittleFe, the portable High Performance Computer cluster designed and built by Charlie and the Cluster group has been featured in The Register, on-line news for IT professionals: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/19/littlefe_cluster

New cluster for Earlham's Cluster Computing Group

Charlie Peck, Alex Lemann, and Kevin Hunter attended SC06, the
supercomputing conference last week in Tampa, FL. While there
Charlie entered a contest sponsored by Intel and ultimately won an 8
node, 64 core (~500 GFLOP) computational cluster. The three of them
also participated in the 2 day SC Educational Program and made
numerous presentations on their LittleFe project.

The new cluster will be used to support local projects in
computational chemistry (Lori Watson, Chemistry), phylogenetic
inference (John Iverson, Biology) and genetic sequencing (Peter
Blair, Biology). It will also be used by the National Computational
Science Institute and the SC Education Program to develop curriculum
modules for high performance computing and computational science.

URLS:

http://cluster.earlham.edu - Earlham's Cluster Computing Group
http://sc06.supercomputing.org - SC06 SuperComputing Conference
ttp://LittleFe.net - Portable computational cluster
http://computationalscience.org - National Computational Science
Institute
http://sc-education.org - SC Education Program

Network Interruptions

As you may have noticed, we have been experiencing periodic short-term interruptions in the connection between the CS subnet and the rest of Earlham and the world. This appears to be due to a gradually failing switch. There will be an interruption sometime today (Wed) to swap this out with a spare. We'll send a notice out to all the users to warn them when this is imminent. --Jim

Ohio LinuxFest 2006

This is a free (as in free beer, not as in free speach) all-day Linux conference in Columbus, on 30/Sept. Kevin Hunter (ECS, CS alum) is planning on going and likely has some room in his vehicle. There are likely to be others interested in going with other opportunities for ride shariing. For more information, see http://ohiolinux.org/.

If you are not already a member of the cs-students mailing list visit: http://lists.cs.earlham.edu/mailman/listinfo/cs-students to join. Further discussion might be directed there.