Gregory M. Kapfhammer

Fall 2008 Presentations

• September 19, 2008 (Announcement Poster)

  Shafiqur Rahman: Beam Me Up Scotty: The Weird World of Quantum Computers

  
  

  Integrated circuit chips, the brains of modern day computers, are based on principles of quantum physics. However, processing and communication of the information itself is still done in fully classical ways. New forms of computers are being developed which will use quantum-bits and quantum-logic, and strange and counter-intuitive ideas such as interference and quantum teleportation (like in Star Trek's "Beam me up, Scotty!"). These new computers will have powers that are truly unthinkable- a quantum computer with 250 quantum bits will be able to simultaneously process more numbers than the total number of atoms in the universe! This has the potential to completely revolutionize information processing and information technology.
  
  

• October 31, 2008 (Announcement Poster)

  Matthew C. Jadud: Designing Usable Languages

  
  

  Many students ask me: "When can I start programming my robot army for world conquest?" The disappointing answer is that it often takes years of study to get to this point. But what if we understood how people learned to program, and could use that information to design languages that were fit for their intended purpose? This talk will explore some research regarding how we learn to program, some work regarding parallel programming for little robots, and close by musing on how these ideas merge when we begin questing after the design of usable programming languages.
  
  

• November 14, 2008 (Announcement Poster)

  James Devine: The Real Cost of Operating System Virtualization

  
  

  Virtualization has become a new buzz word in the computing community. It offers many benefits over the traditional one server per machine architecture. Virtualization takes advantage of the fact that most servers are only using a very small percentage of their resources. Through virtualization, underutilized physical resources are virtualized and then shared between several guest operating systems, offering many benefits.

  
  However, the benefits of virtualization do come at a price since there is an inherent performance cost of virtualizing a server. To determine the impact this process has on virtual machine performance an empirical study was conducted on the MNJE (MITRE New Jersey Eatontown) virtual cluster. This talk provides an analysis of the results and then makes recommendations about virtualization performance and best practices.
  
  

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• Research in Computer Science Seminar last edited on 29 September 2009 at 10:26 pm by 141.195.226.29