Its that time again….Robots, Networks and Clusters make one happy man.

I don’t know why I am making this post at 3:00am when I should be sleeping..well, the quarter is drawing to an end and all looking back I can describe it with one word “Edutainment” (quotes needed). “Edu” is from the word education meaning this quarter has been highly informative. I learnt quite a lot of things ranging from what makes the internet work(routing) in networking to what makes a super computer super in high performance computing. The “tainment” part of course refers to how interesting and mostly fun it has been for me. I wrote programs showing how routing algorithms such as RIP and OSPF work, programs the are highly scalable running on our 32 node cluster and even programs that make use of highly parallelized and specialized hardware clusters like the Nvidia General Purpose GPU and Playstation 3.

Is this the most fun I have ever had? The answer will be no. I think next quarter( Spring) holds even much more fun. I actually get to take a class I have been dreaming about for years. The advanced computer architecture. This will be my formal introduction to the field of robotics. We will build robots to solve very complex maze problems with basic sensors such as Infra red, sonar, image processing sensors and hopefully the cheapest laser range scanners we can find. I can already see the applications of this quarters’ classes. What can clusters, networking and robotics give you. The answer is one word “Intelligence”. We can build a robot that connects to the school cluster via wifi to perform image processing tasks. Since this is compute intensive and network latency also plays a major role, the image processing aspect of the robot will only be used for long range perception. We can incorporate the sonar and infra-red sensors for “immediate sensing”. I go to sleep this night full of excitement and anticipation

…one thing is certain, after this academic year, I will have carved my own niche in computer science, the language of gods.

 

UPDATE: Instead of using a traditional cluster with network latency issues, we can explore some GP GPU image processing since it performs exceedingly well in huge matrix computations…^_^

~ by Chuka on February 20, 2008.