The Great Lakes Consortium is the result of collaboration among colleges, universities, national research laboratories and other educational institutions dedicated to the Blue Waters Project.

The Blue Waters Project, based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications, will build a machine in conjunction with IBM capable of sustaining computations of one to two petaflops – computing parlance for 1 quadrillion calculations per second – on many practical scientific and engineering applications.

The consortium’s ultimate goal is for Blue Waters to be fully user-friendly for scientists across the country, so when it launches, it will include intense support for application development, system software development, interactions with business and industry and educational programs.

Iowa State University researchers Srinivas Aluru, Mark Gordon and James Oliver say they’re eager to help the scientific community step into what they call the second revolution in information technology.

Aluru, a Stanley Chair in Interdisciplinary Engineering and a professor of electrical and computer engineering, will direct ISU’s work with the consortium.

“The dramatic increase in computing capability makes this project a national asset,” he said. “A lot of money will be poured into this research. To justify public expenditure we want to be ready.”

The National Science Foundation is supporting the supercomputer project with a $208 million grant, said Aluru, whose research group has used supercomputing power to help with the recently concluded effort to sequence the corn genome. To do that, they developed software that uses thousands of processors to build genome assemblies in days instead of months.

And now Aluru is ready to make the leap to even more powerful computing. But before that can happen, researchers must work out the bugs and bottlenecks that petascale computational levels might present.

The issue is not just Blue Waters’ peak potential, but its sustained capacity while solving problems, he said.

“That efficiency depends on the code we write,” he said. “We need to find the way to get higher than 70 percent efficiency on solving several challenges.”

Mark Gordon, ISU’s Frances M. Craig Distinguished Professor of chemistry and the director of the applied mathematics program for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, said parallel computing in chemistry, for example, has used, at most, clusters of 32-128 computers for supercomputing challenges for the past 15 to 20 years. Researchers therefore haven’t had the hands-on opportunity to work through the potential bottlenecks for using up to 100,000 clusters.

“It’s a whole new ballgame with new bottlenecks,” he said. “When you move toward the petascale range, we might run up against physical limitations, such as the speed of light. And the communications and data sharing issues increase by orders of magnitude. We’ll need an efficient way of communication and comparing and collecting.”

One of the consortium’s strategies will be forming petascale application collaboration teams or PACTS, Aluru said.

“Each team will work on individual problem to figure out how to use the petascale computer and avoid mistakes,” Aluru said.

Aluru said the Nation Science Foundation-funded project will provide two “step-up machines” along the way.

James Oliver, the director of ISU’s CyberInnovation Institute, said the jump to petascale computing power calls for tools such as C6, ISU’s six-sided virtual reality room that displays computer-generated images at the world’s highest resolution. He said C6 would be an ideal place to build interfaces that can display and work with all the data produced by the supercomputer.

Aluru said the consortium held its inaugural meeting this week to begin to lay out the technical challenges it faces. Back at ISU, Gordon said he’s waiting for word from the National Science Foundation to grant his team early access to the Blue Waters team and hardware.

“We’re looking forward to trying out our ideas to see if they’re going to work.”

So I have to admit, I cheated. My background is in product design, I worked for a few years at IDEO and designed products for everyone from Proctor and Gamble to Nike.

We didn’t mean to exclude people with education or work experience in product design. We just want to see what sort of innovations are possible for individuals or small groups outside of corporate R&D. Anthony’s projects definitely qualify:

I was constantly frustrated by all the cool things we designed never hitting the market or getting raped and pillaged by corporate marketing departments. While on a climbing trip in May, a friend of mine and I decided that we needed a coffee press that fit inside of our Nalgene water bottles.

Some napkin sketches led to some prototypes which led to some more prototypes which led to many sleepless nights and all eventually led to the Press-bot.

Anthony, who Google shows to be quite an athlete (swimming, running, biking, and climbing) looks at his water bottle and thinks – “this could be better.” And so he turns it into a coffee press. Make sure to check out the video at the Press-bot website.

While he was developing the Press-bot, Anthony got the idea for the Gel-bot. Apparently long-distance runners and cyclists benefit from nutrition taken during a race – and a gel is a handy way to get it. Anthony decided that this gel would be even handier if it could be incorporated into his water bottle.

[Then I] had another pet idea that I made real, or at least am in the process of doing so, Gel-bot. Both projects were self-funded by myself and a fellow tinkerer/engineer. We sourced everything ourselves and have done everything from marketing to supply chain management.

I really don’t think it would have been possible to release a product like this on a shoestring budget 5 years ago. We have made use of every possible technology to help our cause, from open-source software to create finance spreadsheets to free VOIP calls with our manufacturers in China. We have exploited everything we could find.

We even hacked a trade show (read “snuck in”) with a big sign and made our own booth in front of an electrical panel. We built our own booth for the next show we attended (which involved drilling about 300 1/8” holes through aluminum strips help together with quick clamps). We actually paid to attend that one.

Overall I am amazed at the progress we made. It all feels like one big hack because everything has moved so fast but the product is awesome, works great and has been getting great reviews.

Cheers!

Anthony

And all it took was a little creativity, a lot of hard work, and I’m guessing he had some fun too. Thanks Anthony. Make sure to check out the Press-bot and Gel-bot websites. Both sites have product demonstration videos.

If you’d like your project to be featured in a future edition of “Geek Projects,” please email me at:

mrstg87

{at}

yahoo

{dot}

com

The first project has been completed, and the second is an ongoing project that Micah of “Event Horizon” is working on.

These projects were unrelated except that both are efforts by individuals to make something new. It shows an unwillingness on their part to wait for big corporate R&D departments to produce what they want.

Here’s the bleg: if you love to tinker in your garage, we’d like to hear about your pet project – especially if you are inventing something new or if you are putting together existing tech in a new way.

It can be an ongoing project or something you’ve completed. If you’re a blogger, send us a link to your post(s) on the project. If you’re not a blogger, email us your story and attach pictures.

Pictures are key. We want to see what you’ve done.

Our goal with the “Geek Projects” feature is to demonstrate that the day of garage innovation is not over. In fact, we expect to see a renaissance of personal innovation as the tools that allow this kind of creativity become more attainable.

Help us follow this trend by sending in your project.

Contact us at:

mrstg87

{at symbol}

yahoo

{dot}

com