This coming weekend, dozens of developers, designers, makers, students and creative problem solvers will gather in Baltimore’s Betamore for Power the Future, a 36-hour hackathon focused on building apps and tools to better all forms of energy creation and consumption. There is $5,000 in cash and other prizes up for grabs.

It’s a great opportunity for students to engage in Baltimore’s hackathon and startup community. To make it even more attractive, Betamore CEO and co-founder Mike Brenner has set up a discount code that UMBC students can use to register for free. Send email from your umbc address to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. to get the code.

The event, sponsored by Constellation Energy, will be held from 9:00am Saturday November 2 to 6:00pm Sunday November 3 at the Betamore campus in the Federal Hill neighborhood of downtown Baltimore at 1111 Light Street. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner on both Saturday and Sunday will be provided.

Get more information and register here.

The hackathon’s agenda includes concept pitches, team formation, around the clock working, and finally product demos on Sunday to a panel of judges that will be doling out more than $5,000 in cash and other energy-related prizes like Nest thermostats, Philips Hue light bulbs, and even free membership at Betamore to help usher a potential team’s weekend idea into a newly formed company. Designed to spotlight the creation of apps and tools that better all forms of energy creation and consumption, the hackathon will give a voice to those who want to see change and are willing to roll up their sleeves to contribute.

See more at http://betamore.com/power-the-future/.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

Multiple Objective Task Scheduling
for Scalable High Performance Computing

Tyler A. Simon

12:30-2:30 Friday, 8 November 2013, ITE 325b

Individual processor frequencies have reached an upper physical and practical limit. Processor designs now involve adding multiple processing elements to a single chip to enable increased performance. It is expected that all future processor designs will have multiple cores with a focus on reducing frequencies and adding more individual processing elements (cores) while having to balance power consumption, reliability and maintain high performance.

Due to the increased complexity as well as increased heterogeneity of parallel architectures, petascale and future exascale systems, with the number of processors on the order of 10^8-10^9, must incorporate more intelligent software tools that help manage parallel execution for the user. I demonstrate that by managing the parallel execution environment at runtime, we can satisfy performance tradeoffs for a particular application or application domain for a set of common HPC architectures. It is expected that future exascale computing systems will have to execute programs on many individual and potentially low powered processing elements. These processors need to be fed data efficiently and reliably through the duration of a parallel computation.

In this thesis I provide a performance analysis of two common graph algorithms for finding a minimum spanning tree and evaluate the multicore performance of a common high performance computing (HPC) benchmark on multicore processors. I also develop a novel autonomic execution model and adaptive runtime system (ARRIA) Adaptive Runtime Resource for Intensive Applications. ARRIA is designed with the intent of improving application programmability, scalability and performance while freeing the programmer from explicit message passing and thread management. Experiments are conducted that evaluate ARRIA’s capabilities on data intensive applications, those where the majority of execution time is spent reading and writing either to local or remote memory locations. In my approach, I focus on developing task schedules that satisfy multiple objectives for clusters of compute nodes during runtime. This approach is novel in that it can control application performance and satisfy constraints that are solved using multi objective optimization techniques as the program runs. The development and implementation of the ARRIA runtime system and subsequent optimization criteria likely provide reasonable models for the exascale computing era.

The results of this dissertation demonstrate, experimentally, that for high performance computing systems, a dynamic, task based, parallel programming environment and scheduler can provide lower total workload runtimes and high utilization compared with commonly used static scheduling policies.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Quantum Computing Seminar

Thermal Light N-qubit

Tao Peng (PhD Advisor: Yanhua Shih)
UMBC Physics Department

2:30-3:00 Tuesday, 22 October 2013, ITE 325b

This talk will discuss the equipment and optical elements that required for building the incoherent thermal source, the qubit, and the detection scheme of the intensity fluctuation-fluctuation correlation.

All optical XOR, CNOT gates with initial insight
for quantum computation using linear optics

Omar Shehab (PhD Advisor: Samuel Lomonaco)
UMBC CSEE Department

3:00-3:30 pm, Tuesday, 22 October 2013, ITE 325b

The design for an all-optical XOR gate is proposed. The basic idea is to split the input beams, and let them cancel or strengthen each other selectively, or flip the encoded information based on their polarization properties. The information is encoded in terms of polarization of the beam. Polarization of a light beam is well understood, hence, the design should be feasible to implement. The truth table of the optical circuit is worked out and compared with the expected truth table. Then it is demonstrated that the design complies with the linear behavior of the XOR function.

Next, based on a similar idea, the design of an all-optical CNOT gate is proposed. The truth table for the gate is verified. Then, it is discussed how this approach can be used for Linear Optics Quantum Computation (LOQC). It is shown that a Hadamard gate, a rotation gate, and a CNOT gate make up a universal set of quantum gates based on linear optics. This novel approach requires no additional power supply, extra input beam or ancilla photon to operate. It also does not require an expensive and complex single photon source and detector. Only narrowband laser sources are required to operate these gates.

Organizer: Prof. Samuel Lomonaco, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

The UMBC ACM student chapter will host the second meetup of Baltimore Code Craftsmanship user group at 6:45pm on Thursday, October 24 in the ITE building on the UMBC Campus.

This meetup is for the students and software developers in the Baltimore area that care about the quality of their work and want to practice and improve their programming skills, share what they know and learn new things from others.

Members of the UMBC community can RSVP for the event by completing this form. More details can be found on the form or below. Participants outside of the UMBC community should register on the meetup site. Registration for this meetup is available for a limited number of participants.

This is a hands on coding user group with no presentations. Each meeting will be a dojo where we will go through a challenging software craftsmanship exercise that focuses on clean code, test-driven development, design patterns, and refactoring. We will pair up and practice on a kata in order to learn and apply the values, principles, and disciplines of software craftsmanship. Come with your laptop equipped with your favorite programming and automated unit testing environment. If you don’t have a laptop, come anyway, we will need only one laptop for every two people. Be prepared to pair up, learn, share and have fun!

The event is open to all UMBC students, however programming ability is required. Interested faculty members can join in too! This can also be a good opportunity to network with professionals from various companies and get yourself noticed for any job opportunities that exist.

If you have questions or suggestions, send email to Primal Pappachan (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) or Vladimir Korolev (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ).

The UMBC Council of Computing Majors (CCM) will meet from Noon to 1:00pm on Monday, October 21 in room 101 in the Administration building. CCM is a student organization representing undergraduate computer science and computer engineering majors and anyone else with an interest in computing. Everyone is welcome.

At next week’s meeting, Austin Murdock will give an overview of Raspberry Pi and Arduino technology and lead a discussion about possible CCM group projects involving them.

The Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive, credit-card-sized single-board computer that runs Linux and Arduino is a single-board microcontroller used to make using electronics in multidisciplinary projects more accessible. Their low cost, size and power requirements make them ideal for building novel embedded applications in a familiar Linux environment using open source software.

Dr. Evelyn Erenrich from Rutgers University will talk on “An Inside Look at Graduate School and Summer Research: How to Prepare, Get Accepted, and Succeed” at Noon on Wednesday, October 16 in room 208, Public Policy.

In addition to discussing strategies for research success, Dr. Erenrich will spotlight exciting programs and interdisciplinary training opportunities at Rutgers University, including a summer program, RiSE (Research in Science and Engineering), which has included many UMBC students. Mr. Immanuel Williams, a UMBC alumnus who is currently a doctoral Fellow at Rutgers, will be joining me to give his personal perspective. Students can also sign up for individual appointments by contacting Ms. Alicia Hall, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

The results of the UMBC Homecoming Spirit Office Decorating Contest were revealed last night at the Faculty/Staff Social. More than 30 offices participated this year and the CSEE Department’s entry took first place in the Judge’s Choice category, which was based on site visits by a panel of judges from the UMBC alumni association, and third place in the People’s Choice category, which was determined by an online vote. The first place showing in the Judges Choice competition comes with a trophy and ten tickets to the Homecoming community picnic.

Congratulations to the CSEE staff for the great job of decorating the ITE325 suite for UMBC’s Homecoming. See pictures of their Maryland Beach Picnic themed display and stop by ITE325 during the rest of this week to experience the full multimedia effect and let the Department’s staff know what you think of their effort.

UMBC’s CyberDawgs placed second at the 2013 Maryland Cyber Challenge (MDC3) finals that were held in Baltimore on October 9 as part of the CyberMaryland 2013 conference.

CyberDawgs-1 (pictured above) included William Thomas, Anthony Sasadeusz, Kenneth Johansen Jorge Teixeira, AJ Hallameyer, and Fahad Alduraibi.

During the finals, teams competed in a Control-the-Flag event where they attempted to gain (and maintain) control of other systems on the network – which were also being targeted by other teams seeking to gain and ‘own’ them as well.

All of UMBC’s three CyberDawg teams competed vigorously throughout the MDC3 season and maintained a very tight scoring situation for the college division. However, by taking second place in today’s finals, each member of CyberDawgs-1 will receive a $2,000 cash prize provided by the National Security Agency.

CSEE’s Dr. Richard Forno and Dr. Charles Nicholas are faculty advisors to the team.  UMBC is a co-founder of the Maryland Cyber Challenge.