From jferraio at brynmawr.edu Tue Sep 6 23:33:31 2005 From: jferraio at brynmawr.edu (Ferraioli Julia Rebecca) Date: Tue Sep 6 23:33:35 2005 Subject: [Compsci] Computer Science Pizza Party Message-ID: Welcome back to Bryn Mawr and our amazing Computer Science Department! We're so pleased to have you all here, especially the new students. And in celebration of this occasion, we are throwing a CS Tea for anyone who is interested and for those already involved in the Computer Science Department. Here's the info: 4:00pm this Thursday in the 231 Computer Science Lab, Park Science Building. Pizza and drinks will be provided! Keep in mind that this will be a great chance to get free food and information about this great and growing department. All of the Faculty and "old-timer" students would love to meet all of those interested in Computer Science. This a chance for everyone to get to know each other (and to get free food). Come check us out! We hope that you all will be there! Looking forward to seeing you, Audrey Flattes '06 Julia Ferraioli '07 Your major reps! From dblank at brynmawr.edu Mon Sep 12 08:18:00 2005 From: dblank at brynmawr.edu (Douglas S. Blank) Date: Mon Sep 12 08:18:03 2005 Subject: [Compsci] Talk on Friday, 4pm Message-ID: <432571F8.8080905@brynmawr.edu> Title : Living in a Peta-flop world Speaker : Dr. Pat Miller Date/Time: Friday, September 16, 4pm Back in the "day," high performance computing (HPC) meant that you had access to a Cray-1 supercomputer capable of an amazing 80 million floating point operations a second (MFLOPS). To get access to this startlingly fast resource, you needed to recast all of your (FORTRAN) programs into vectorized form to take advantage of the underlying hardware. Fast forward to the 1990's when the first gigaflop machines appeared, again with specialized, vastly parallel hardware and programming needs (e.g. Connection Machine's CM-5). The first teraflop machines in the late 90's were clusters with hundreds of processors requiring MPI libraries and SPMD style programming. Now we stand on the threshold of petaflop machines with hundreds of thousands of processors. The old models of programming are yet again insufficient to deal with the new architectures! Dr. Miller will talk about ways to cope. He will discuss Livermore's Petascale Simulation Initiative which is developing new MPMD programming models; pyMPI, his parallel tool for interacting with thousands of processors; and his hobby project -- Science by FlashMob, which lets scientists cheaply and quickly create small to moderate sized parallel computer clusters. Dr. Miller is a computational scientist for the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a Consulting Professor at Stanford University's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. He specializes in the creation and understanding of parallel programming languages. From jferraio at brynmawr.edu Mon Sep 12 23:28:18 2005 From: jferraio at brynmawr.edu (Ferraioli Julia Rebecca) Date: Mon Sep 12 23:28:20 2005 Subject: [Compsci] Re: class07: Proposed Computer Science Major - What do you think? (fwd) Message-ID: Hi all, Don't know if you caught the class07 message today about the Proposed Computer Science Major in the flurry of activities emails going around. I sent Norma an email today in response, and I'm forwarding her email back to me. She'd love to get more responses, and you all would be great to do this! Please take time out of your days (busy, I know!) to do this. It will impact the Curriculum Committee's decision, not to mention your time in this department. I strongly encourage you to write to Norma about your feelings on this topic. Sincerely, Julia Ferraioli Major Rep, class of 2007 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2005 23:05:05 -0400 (EDT) From: naltshul@brynmawr.edu To: Ferraioli Julia Rebecca Subject: Re: class07: Proposed Computer Science Major - What do you think? Dear Julia, Thank you for such an extensive response. I'm particularly glad to hear a student perspective on the bi-co departments. Some members of the administration seem eager to see where combination can save the college resources, and it's good to be able to bring specifics of what problems with doing so might be from a student perspective. Could you encourage any other students - Bryn Mawr or Haverford - you know with strong interests in computer science at this college to write to me about this issue, and/or other issues with the major? Also, if you have any additional comments on the structure of the major (specific course requirements - and is thirteen courses too much?) - I'd love to be able to bring them. Norma > On Mon, 12 Sep 2005 > naltshul@brynmawr.edu wrote: > >> Want to major in computer science? Or are you simply willing to offer >> wisdom based on experience in the department? >> >> The Curriculum Committee is considering a proposal for a major in >> computer >> science, and the student reps want to incorperate your input. The >> currently proposed requirements are outlined below; we're particularly >> interested in >> >> 1) Feedback about the structure of the major >> 2) The role the Haverford counterpart department should play in the >> program >> >> Please respond as soon as possible with your thoughts. >> >> Thanks, Norma Altshuler, Student Curriculum Committee co-head >> >> >> Thirteen courses are required for the major, and must include: >> >> CS 110 : Introduction to Computer Science >> CS 206: Data Structures >> MATH 231: Discrete Mathematics >> CS 240: Principles of Computer Organization >> CS 245: Principles of Programming Languages >> Senior Project/Thesis >> From dblank at mainline.brynmawr.edu Fri Sep 16 00:30:48 2005 From: dblank at mainline.brynmawr.edu (Douglas S. Blank) Date: Fri Sep 16 00:31:37 2005 Subject: [Compsci] today's 4pm talk Message-ID: <432A4A78.5080707@cs.brynmawr.edu> Just a quick reminder and an update: the 4pm talk today will be in Park Science, room 338. Hope you can make it! -Doug ------- Title : Living in a Peta-flop world Speaker : Dr. Pat Miller Date/Time: Friday, September 16, 4pm Back in the "day," high performance computing (HPC) meant that you had access to a Cray-1 supercomputer capable of an amazing 80 million floating point operations a second (MFLOPS). To get access to this startlingly fast resource, you needed to recast all of your (FORTRAN) programs into vectorized form to take advantage of the underlying hardware. Fast forward to the 1990's when the first gigaflop machines appeared, again with specialized, vastly parallel hardware and programming needs (e.g. Connection Machine's CM-5). The first teraflop machines in the late 90's were clusters with hundreds of processors requiring MPI libraries and SPMD style programming. Now we stand on the threshold of petaflop machines with hundreds of thousands of processors. The old models of programming are yet again insufficient to deal with the new architectures! Dr. Miller will talk about ways to cope. He will discuss Livermore's Petascale Simulation Initiative which is developing new MPMD programming models; pyMPI, his parallel tool for interacting with thousands of processors; and his hobby project -- Science by FlashMob, which lets scientists cheaply and quickly create small to moderate sized parallel computer clusters. Dr. Miller is a computational scientist for the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a Consulting Professor at Stanford University's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. He specializes in the creation and understanding of parallel programming languages. From jferraio at brynmawr.edu Wed Sep 21 09:58:04 2005 From: jferraio at brynmawr.edu (Ferraioli Julia Rebecca) Date: Wed Sep 21 09:58:07 2005 Subject: [Compsci] Programming Competition! Message-ID: For the past two years, the students in the Computer Science Department have participated in the famous Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest. Both years we have sent one team (three people) and ranked highly each time. This year's competition is in November, and we are looking for participants! Participants commit to training sessions (to be announced) and, of course, the eventual contest. This is a great opportunity to build group activity skills and to hone your programming skills. Interested? Contact Dr. Xu at dxu@brynmawr.edu for more info. Sincerely, Julia Ferraioli Class of '07 From dblank at brynmawr.edu Thu Sep 22 10:27:27 2005 From: dblank at brynmawr.edu (Douglas S. Blank) Date: Thu Sep 22 10:27:32 2005 Subject: [Compsci] Friday talk Message-ID: <4332BF4F.5080606@brynmawr.edu> [Talk this Friday on a topic related to computing. Park 180 at 4:30. -Doug] DIAMONDOIDS ARE FOREVER: USING QUANTUM MECHANICS AND SUPERCOMPUTERS TO CALCULATE THE PROPERTIES OF REAL MATERIALS Steven L. Richardson Department of Electrical Engineering Howard University School of Engineering Washington, DC 20059 srichards22@comcast.net Diamondoids are cage-like saturated hydrocarbon molecules that possess a rigid carbon framework which is superimposable upon the crystal structure of diamond. While lower-order diamondoids (e.g. adamantane (C10H16), diamantane (C14H20), triamantane (C18H24), and anti-tetramantane (C22H28)) have been synthesized in the lab attempts to make even larger diamondoids have not been successful to date. This field has recently been rejuvenated with the fascinating report by Dahl et al. of Chevron-Texaco (J. E. Dahl, S. G. Liu, and R. M. K. Carlson, Science 299 (2003) 96) of the isolation of new diamondoids from petroleum oil. Given their rigid structures and unique shapes of diamondoids they might be potential building blocks for various applications in nanotechnology. Recently, the Chevron-Texaco group also isolated and characterized a novel, disc-shaped lower-order diamondoid named cyclohexamantane (C26H30). In this talk we will discuss density-functional theory (DFT) which is a very successful approximation for solving the Schr?dinger wave equation for real materials. DFT has been used in physics and chemistry for the last forty years and it can be implemented on modern massively parallelized supercomputers to compute the structural, electronic, and vibrational properties of real materials and molecules from first-principles, that is without any experimental input. In particular, we will show that DFT calculations are capable of providing important information about cyclohexamantane and that our results are in very good agreement with recent experimental vibrational data. We are confident that DFT could help experimentalists in identifying more complicated diamondoids either isolated from natural products or made by rational synthesis. -- Douglas S. Blank, Assistant Professor dblank@brynmawr.edu, (610)526-6501 Bryn Mawr College, Computer Science Program 101 North Merion Ave, Park Science Bld. Bryn Mawr, PA 19010 dangermouse.brynmawr.edu