Research Exhibit
The above image shows the location of our 20'x20' research exhibit at IEEE/ACM SC2004, booth number 853. This year, we were not an island booth, but our location was rather mainstream, at the end of the first aisle to the left of the main entrance. The exhibit was again under the title Aggregate.Org / University of Kentucky, the informal research consortium led by our KAOS (Compilers, Hardware Architectures, and Operating Systems) group here at the University of Kentucky's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Although we had a very wide range of topics to discuss, the work emphasized in our exhibit is summarized on the following posters:
Based on the responses of the people visiting our exhibit, the most interest was in:
We will be posting links for all the major topics here sometime this week.
Our booth consisted of five major components: the pentagonal display (front left), lighted sign and literature handout station (front right), Warewulf demo clusters (middle and back left), conference table (middle right), and project posters (back right). The most obvious thing was the pentagonal display, which we used to rear-project several 5-slide automated shows and to provide interactive slide shows and demos of the CDR/BDR. However, the bulk of the hardware was in the Warewulf demo clusters:
There were two demo clusters. The first was an Athlon laptop cluster configured as a 2x2 video wall; the second was an Athlon64 desktop cluster configured with LCD monitors as a 4x1 video wall. Demos involved using Warewulf to load cAos 2 or CentOS and then running our old pan and zoom application (using TTL_PAPERS and our AFAPI video wall library) with a high-resolution photograph of the University of Kentucky that had six Warewulf logos hidden in it for folks to find.
This year, from the University of Kentucky we had two faculty and nine students staffing our exhibit. Interestingly, the nine students consisted of one undergraduate Computer Science student (not pictured; he had to leave early) and eight graduate Electrical and Computer Engineering students (four men and four women). There was also one faculty member from Penn State Erie.
Inexplicably, three of the women graduate students sprouted antenae during the conference... presumably this was related to the fact that we couldn't afford a wired network connection to our booth, so all network access was wireless. ;-)
The image below is the last from a slow-framerate live-update Olympus D340R digital camera a with 183-degree fisheye lens. The camera captured about one 1-megapixel image every 30 seconds or so and every fifth image was updated live on our website during the conference.
We have constructed animated-GIF timelapse movies of each of the days of our exhibit and made them available here. Saturday and Sunday were booth setup; the exhibits opened late Monday, continuing through Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
The only thing set in stone is our name.