PJM

After applying some finishing touches, the Mindy K’s site is live.  MindyKs.com features a comprehensive menu as well as other details about the restaurant. To reduce cost, this site is hosted on my web server.

The summer of 2011 was filled with both the expected and unexpected. Four healthy calves were born to their protective mothers. A variety of organic produce was grown in the gardens, encompassing everything from garlic to corn. This season’s crop of hay was strong and for the most part, the weather cooperated. As for the unexpected, the farm hosted a plane crash. In addition to these, the remaining time was spent with smaller projects and friends.

Ultimately, we ended up at Moosehead Lake for our ritual end of summer vacation to see old friends and celebrate another great year.

Today on June 23, the first calf of the year was born on Hawkshead Farm.

To complete my four years at Champlain College, I designed and built a cluster computer. The hardware was three old Gateway 955 servers, equipped with 2.40 GHz processors and 512MB of RAM each. To tie the machines together I used a combination of 100Base-T network through Ethernet and MPI. I ran Linpack to benchmark the cluster and three other workstations. From this data, I compared the results and determined the effectiveness of my cluster.

The majority of the time spent on this project involved optimizing Linpack to run as efficiently as possible. Before starting this undertaking, I had no idea of the scale in which tuning Linpack is necessary. The best result I was able to achieve was 7.9 GFlops, or about 55% efficiency compared to the theoretical peak. In contrast, supercomputers on the Top500 list operate at around 80% efficiency and push over 2,000 TFlops. Unfortunately, with a $0 budget, I could never feasibly break 60%.

This project was an attempt to create a Pong game using the SunSpots as controllers, moving the paddles up and down. The entirety of the program is written in Java. Bits of the code originated from samples written by Sun, however it was thoroughly developed. The overall game progressed through many versions over the course of two months as we sporadically worked on it. Special thanks to DJ Cole for art contributions, as well as Will Nowak and Nirav Patel for code help. Additional thanks to Jim Hoag for letting us borrow the Spots.

SunSpot Pong Source

Discosaurs Source

The source can only be compiled and run on a BaseStation in this version.

Discosaurs in action on Youtube

Her name is Teemo and she is going to kill us all.

The Daft Table is essentially a coffee table with an array of lights divided into a grid. The hardware, including the physical construction, LED boards, wiring, and arduino are finished. However, only very simplistic code was written for this table.