This is the home page for our 24^th major research exhibit at the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing conference. The exhibit is again under the slightly changed title University of Kentucky / Aggregate.Org, reflecting the fact that it is now officially led by the Center for Computational Sciences. Of course, 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 still has a large fraction of the materials in the booth. We are booth #943, a 10x20 booth; we're sort-of in the middle of the exhibit hall.

Our 24^th Exhibit

As usual, our research exhibit this year will be showing a lot of different things we have developed or are developing... ranging from supercomputer architecture to 3D printing technology and various computational photography things.

Handouts

We kept handouts to just six topics:

• How Low Can You Go? -- supercomputing has long been about maximizing parallelism. Well, that's not the big problem anymore. Now, it's all about power. We have been developing compiler technology that is strong enough to do gate-level optimization of whole programs, thus minimizing the number of active gates needed to accomplish a computation.
• Cameras As Computing Systems -- this overviews some of the multi-cameras and other research we've been doing treating cameras as computing systems. After all, our approach is really about looking at all aspects of a computing system and improving how the hardware and software components interact in order to get higher performance and new capabilities... not shocking we do that for computer systems that look like cameras....
• TIK: Temporal Imaging from Kentucky -- for years we've been working on Time Domain Continuous Imaging (TDCI), which replaces the concept of am imager capturing frames with capture of continuous waveforms for pixel light level over time. With TIK, you can do this using conventional still and video cameras!
• Making Time Tooling Around -- Perhaps you're wondering what the computer engineering research group that created PCCTS/Antlr, SWAR (SIMD Within A Register), the first Linux PC cluster supercomputer, FNNs (Flat Neighborhood Networks), and MOG (MIMD On GPU) is doing playing with machine tools? We began using these machines to make camera parts for our computational photography research, but we're really about making the hardware and systems software components of a computing system work better together, and those machine tools are computer systems. Never forget that you can use your tools to make better tools....
• Performance-Engineered Computer Networks -- an overview of the many tools and technologies we have developed to improve computer networks, especially those within parallel supercomputers. AFNs, FNNs, KNITT, Netwires, and NodeScape are all briefly described. (Just two years ago, we learned that Google has been using our FNN work as the basis for designing much of their network infrastructure.)
• A Maze of Twisty Little Passages -- an update to MOG (MIMD on GPU). The MOG core is becoming close to production quality and there are now several system calls implemented (the GPU code can now perform host system calls). We didn't bring the big wooden maze, but did bring a couple of small plastic ones that made the MIMD-can-run-efficiently-on-SIMD point as well as their giant wooden sibling used to.

Here's what our booth looks like this year:

3D Printer

3D printing plays a major role in the computational photography work we are doing (for 3D printing custom camera parts), and 3D printing is cool, but we didn't want to risk bringing our MakerGear M2 as airline checked baggage. Thus, we bought and brought a $400 Wanhao I3. Really quite a nice machine... more finished than the M2, and capable of comprable print quality, but at much slower print speeds. We are using it to 3D-print working mechanical NOR gates, which we are handing out at SC17:

The GateRodders 3D-printed mechanical NOR gates that we printed and gave away at SC17 now have their design posted as Thing 2654691.

Group Photos

Here's the Aggregate.Org contingent in our research exhibit. You can see the whole exhibit pretty well here; there were four TVs running presentations in the corners, four back-to-back pull-up posters defining the back of the booth, and two tables in the front. The left one held handouts, the right one had our 3D printer (the Wanhao i3) and two laptops for running the printer and giving demos. From left to right, that's Jong Wu, Paul Eberhart, Clark Demaree, Randy Fisher, and Hank Dietz in front.

Here's proof I occassionally even feed my people....

Here's a photo with all the folks from the University of Kentucky.

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