Sunday, March 27, 2011

Half empty, or half full?

As we near the half way point of the semester, with the Tapia conference and spring break both right around the corner, it certainly is warranting of another moment to reflect on everything that we have done. This is especially true and fitting being that we are waiting on our GPU programs to become agreeable and new data sets to become available to analyze.

As I mentioned in my previous post we have achieved the milestone we essentially have been aiming for since the beginning of this research - Model the CPU, AC power, and Disk usage of a computer. In doing so, we have paved way for the preparation of (attempting) modeling the GPU as well, on some recognizable, not so horrific data set. With exactly 2 months until commencement, the time is ticking on producing said models. But, we are confident that we will do so by then.

To expand upon that, our goal right now is to have these readily available by the beginning of spring break (April 18th), in order to be able to improve upon these models when we return the following week. Theoretically, if we are able to do so, we will have surpassed the previous gains from last year's SSU CREU research. Eventually, we will hopefully discover better ways to model GPU power consumption and make, if even slightly, a little more sense of a relatively unexplored topic. For now, unfortunately, we are at the mercy of NVIDIA's GPU programs and CUDA not quite agreeing the way NVIDIA would with more established OS's.

To be continued.... !

Monday, March 14, 2011

Friday, March 11, 2011

Meet the team!

After the good news you'll hear about from Vince, it's hard to go back to the dark side of research. Once the victory dances and celebratory cheering are over, the return to grunt work is a little daunting. With every step forward there is a laundry list of new things to do like installing benchmark software, more data modeling, running new tests...so instead of talking about that we'll introduce you to the intrepid research team behind this project! Pictures in large part and with great thanks to Roger Mamer.

First, meet our research advisor, professor at SSU and fearless leader Dr. Suzanne Rivoire! Dr. Rivoire is the one armed with the Diet Pepsi on the far right.Disclosure: Pepsi Co. is not funding our project. Nor are they probably even aware of our project. If Pepsi Co. would like to invest in our research they are more than welcome to of course!

Next say hi to Vincent Morrow, research assistant and fellow SSU student! He's obviously pointing out something important and very interesting with the cursor. What could possibly be on this screen? It doesn't look like code or benchmarks, so I'm guessing it's probably the Ubuntu community forum. They're the silent, helpful, overlooked honorary partner in this project. Big shout out and thanks to all those awesome folks! They've helped immensely when the drivers get cranky over kernel updates.

This is also yet another view of our physical set up. We're located in a corner of secret room in the Darwin building basement. Pretty roomy I'd say for undergraduate research. A nice table for the two computers, a monitor and spare parts. We even have our own whiteboard!

If you thought research was only people you'd be mistaken! Meet Lolcat. Also sometimes called Lolcat the cranky, Lolcat why can't you work?! and Lolcat...ugh. Looking past the two turned off monitors Lolcat is the tower behind the monitor with the cat sticker. This is how to tell apart computers at a glance when they camouflage themselves against non-researcher intruders.

Lastly we have Stephanie Schmidt and Rickroll! Steph is the human to the right looking confused about why her picture is being taken. Steph is also the other research assistant on the team and SSU student. Rickroll is the silver tower beside Steph (hiding behind the sans-sticker monitor) and her favorite part about this project. Rickroll's been nicknamed The Perfect Child after only one hiccup where he really wouldn't let go of Fedora. Some things really do live up to their namesake.

We, the team behind Modeling the Power Consumption of Computer Systems with Graphics Processing Units Project, hope you got to know us better. Our research happens in secret rooms in basements with lots of caffeine and code. Look forward to our future posts made of more win and awesome graphs modeling our success.